Location: SR 2442 (Old Liberty Road) and SR 2261 (Ramseur-Julian Road) at Melancton
County: Randolph
Original Date Cast: 2006
Herman Husband played a key role in the Regulator movement, culminating in the Battle of Alamance on May 16, 1771. He and other farmers in the vicinity of Sandy Creek formed an association in 1766 to combat civil corruption. In 1768 Edmund Fanning and others seized Husband and jailed him at Hillsborough for “insurgency.” Subsequently released, he again was imprisoned in New Bern for libeling a governmental officer and for threatening the Assembly. After the defeat of the Regulators at Alamance, he fled North Carolina and found a new home in Pennsylvania where he took an active role in Whiskey Rebellion, 1793-1795, a protest against the excise on whiskey.
Husband’s complaints about colonial government originated in the 1750s shortly after his arrival in North Carolina from Maryland. To make a living he grew wheat and operated a grist mill, but he also surveyed and sold land. Husband’s familiarity with land records led him to lodge grievances with the Granville land office in Edenton. The Stamp Act protest of 1765 inspired him to organize opposition to governmental corruption. As the Regulators gained their footing, he served as their spokesman and pamphleteer.
At the time of the War of the Regulation, Husband resided and operated a mill on Sandy Creek in what is now Randolph County.
References:
Mary Elinor Lazenby, Herman Husband: A Story of His Life (1940)
William S. Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, III, 242-243—sketch by Mark H. Jones
William Hogeland, The Whiskey Rebellion: George Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty (2006)