This past Easter, while walking to church up North McKean Street, a truck with the “stars and stripes” waving from its bed drove by my wife and I and it made me think how fortunate we were to live in the United States of America.

We did not have to worry about a government official seeing us enter St. Paul’s Catholic or St. Andrews Presbyterian or the Global Methodist Church. There was no official government church we were expected to attend. Which house of worship we entered that day or if we entered one at all, would not matter.

Seeing the waving banner also made me contemplate that I could stand at a street corner and speak for or against the president of the United States without fear of arrest.

Why no fear of reprisal, because two hundred and fifty years ago, 56 men, with pen in hand, placed their signature on the most meaningful document in American history, “The Declaration of Independence.” Their desire to separate from the British monarchy did not come without risk.

If their dream had been unsuccessful, they could have been executed for treason, their wealth confiscated and their families thrown into poverty for believing in an idea that a government should answer to its people and that no one sovereign ruler had the power to bestow or take away the inalienable rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Too often throughout our history, our people have needed to be reminded of the “Spirit of 76” and what the “Founding Fathers” and the soldiers of the Continental Army had accomplished for their people.

In 1825, for example, President James Monroe invited a hero of the Revolutionary War and general, Marquis de Lafayette, to make a grand tour of the nation, including a stop in Butler, to remind the generation of Americans born after the war of that spirit and the sacrifices made to create a new nation.

The Butler community, however, has never forgotten that sometimes it is necessary to fight to preserve the freedoms granted to us in 1776.

Nearly 100 years after the Revolution, the nation was almost ripped apart by the internal strife of the Civil War. Our residents gathered in front of the Butler County Courthouse to support and give a proper send off to our boys dressed in blue Union Army uniforms. These men were proudly going off to fight to keep the nation whole and widen the concept of “all men are created equal” by setting the enslaved free.

At other times, foreign nations have attempted to extinguish the American “light of liberty.”

Sadly, the price to be paid for the preservation of our “beacon of hope” has been the ultimate sacrifice made by thousands our men and woman throughout our history.

People like 2nd Lt. Charles Hosford, III, of 426 North Main Street. The newly married, 25-year-old became the first soldier from Butler to lose his life serving in World War II on March 16, 1942, while piloting a B-17 Flying Fortress.

Overall, our “Founding Fathers,” and most of those that followed, wished America to be a nation that desires peace and not war.

On Nov. 17, 1918, former President William Howard Taft arrived in Butler and spoke from the stage of the Majestic Theater on the corner of West Cunningham and South McKean Streets. His words were an effort to garner public support for the creation of the League of Nations, forerunner to the United Nations, with the purpose of preventing future wars through open diplomacy, disarmament and the peaceful resolution of international disputes.

The Declaration of Independence and the resulting U. S. Constitution the Founding Fathers created did not guarantee a perfect nation or a nation without war or conflict, but a nation that has strived to be better and to correct injustices with the belief that we are a nation of laws and individual rights.

Throughout our country’s existence, America has also had to fight against internal attempts to stifle our individual economic freedom.

In the early 1870s, John D. Rockefeller attempted to create a monopoly of our oil industry by stifling competition and controlling its supply and price. Fortunately, men such as T.W. Phillips, Sr. stood up to this titan of industry. He sent his friend and attorney, future president of the United States James Garfield, to Butler’s “halls of justice” to file suit against Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. As a result of Phillip’s efforts and the actions of others, the Sherman Antitrust Act was eventually passed by Congress in 1890 to protect citizens from corporate greed.

So, after 250 years, a simple sheet of paper, we call “The Declaration of Independence,” continues to bring the promise of liberty to over 300 million Americans. The 56 revolutionaries of 1776 created what is now the world’s oldest continuing democracy. One Abraham Lincoln called “the last, best hope on earth.”

May we all take a moment today to contemplate the gift those patriots bestowed upon us. A nation with the ability to continually make a better life for all its citizens. May the greatest nation on earth continue to be the envy of the world for another 250 years!

Bill May is a local historian, speaker and tour guide

Bill May, local historian, speaker and tour guide.