Charles Carroll of Carrollton: The Last Signer and the First Stone
- Craig Rhinehart
- 2 hours ago
- 7 min read
How one Maryland founder connected the Declaration of Independence to the dawn of the American railroad age.
A Fourth of July Ceremony in Baltimore
On July 4, 1828, a crowd gathered in Baltimore for a ceremony that joined memory with ambition. The occasion was the laying of the First Stone of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, a new enterprise intended to carry the city’s trade westward to the Ohio River. The honor of placing the stone was given to Charles Carroll of Carrollton, then ninety years old and the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence.
For many in attendance, Carroll’s presence gave the event a significance beyond engineering or commerce. He had been part of the Revolution’s founding generation. His hand had signed the Declaration more than half a century earlier. Now, in old age, he stood at the beginning of another national undertaking. The founding and launch of a railroad that promised to bind city, countryside, mountains, and western markets into a faster-moving American future.
That scene offers a useful way to understand why Carroll belongs in the story of July 4th. On the day we remember the men and women who took risks so that America could become something more than a set of colonies, his life did not simply touch Independence Day once. It intersected with it twice.
In 1776, Charles Carroll of Carrollton placed his name on the Declaration of Independence.
Fifty-two years later, on July 4, 1828, he placed his reputation behind another bold act. The founding of the B&O Railroad.
Maryland’s Cautious Road to Independence
Charles Carroll was born in 1737 into one of Maryland’s most prominent Catholic families. His inheritance gave him wealth and influence, but his religion also placed him outside the full privileges of colonial political life. In a Protestant British empire, Catholics in Maryland had long faced legal and civic restrictions. Carroll grew up with the advantages of education, family, and property, but also with a clear understanding that power could be limited by law, prejudice, and inherited political structures.
That experience shaped the public man he became. Carroll was not an early revolutionary in the dramatic Boston sense. Maryland’s path toward independence was slower and more cautious than that of Massachusetts or Virginia. The colony had powerful commercial ties, divided loyalties, and a political culture wary of rash action. Independence had to be argued into being.
The “First Citizen” and the Politics of Persuasion
In the years before the Declaration, Carroll emerged as one of Maryland’s most important advocates for resistance to British authority. His writings under the name “First Citizen” challenged the claims of colonial officials and helped establish him as a serious political voice. He also joined Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Chase on the 1776 mission to Canada, an unsuccessful but revealing effort by Congress to draw Canadian support away from Britain and toward the American cause.
His most important pre-signing role came in Maryland itself. In June 1776, Maryland’s convention still had to decide whether its delegates in Congress could support independence. Carroll helped move the colony toward that decision. He introduced the resolution that rescinded earlier instructions limiting Maryland’s delegates, clearing the way for Maryland to join the movement for independence. Only after that political shift could Maryland fully support the Declaration.
Important Work, Immediate Impact
He took his seat in the Second Continental Congress on July 18, 1776 … and almost immediately was trusted with serious work. On that first day, he was appointed to examine intercepted correspondence involving Lord Howe and several colonial governors, including Maryland’s Governor Eden.
His peers noticed his impact right away. John Adams, writing later of Carroll’s appointment, called him “an excellent member” whose education, manners, and application to business did honor to what Adams called “the greatest fortune in America.”
Carroll’s signature, therefore, was not an isolated patriotic gesture. It was the visible result of work already done by applying his unique set of skills including persuasion, convention politics, public argument, and the difficult movement of a cautious colony toward revolution.
The Risk Behind the Signature
When Carroll signed the Declaration, he did so with unusual personal risk. He was the only Catholic signer. He was also one of the wealthiest men in America. If the Revolution failed, his fortune and estates made him an obvious target. The phrase “of Carrollton,” added to distinguish him from others of the same name, also had the effect of making him unmistakably identifiable. He did not sign as an abstraction. He signed as a particular man, from a particular estate, with a particular fortune at stake.
Yet Carroll’s importance did not end with the drama of signing. Like many founders, he spent the years after independence engaged in the less theatrical work of government. He served in the Continental Congress, in Maryland’s state conventions, in the Maryland Senate, and later in the United States Senate. He helped carry the Revolution from declaration into administration using his knowledge of taking principle into law, institutions, public credit, taxation, representation, and statecraft.
That postwar service is essential to understanding him. The Declaration announced independence, but independence had to be made workable. Maryland needed a functioning government. The new United States needed public servants who could move from revolutionary opposition to constitutional order. Carroll’s career crossed that difficult divide.
From the Patapsco Valley to the Early Republic
Carroll was also a man of land, business, and internal improvement. In the Patapsco Valley, near the Carroll family estate at Doughoregan Manor, his world intersected with the rise of Ellicott’s Mills. The Ellicott family had arrived in the valley in the 1770s and developed a milling community powered by the Patapsco River. They encouraged local farmers to move from tobacco toward wheat and grain, helping reshape the regional economy. Carroll was an early supporter of the Ellicotts, and the growth of Ellicott’s Mills reflected the kind of practical economic development that would matter deeply in the early republic.
By the 1820s, the question of transportation had become central to Maryland’s future. Baltimore was a rising major port, but it faced fierce competition. Steamboat innovation enabled the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers to be more navagable. New York had opened the Erie Canal in 1825, giving that city a powerful water route to the Great Lakes. Washington and other interests backed the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal. Baltimore needed its own route west, but geography made a canal from the city difficult. The answer was bold and uncertain: a railroad.
The First Stone of the B&O Railroad
The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was chartered in 1827 as the first common carrier railroad in the United States. Its intended destination was the Ohio River, but its first completed section ran thirteen miles from Baltimore to Ellicott’s Mills. Passenger service to Ellicott’s Mills began in May 1830, first with horse-drawn rail cars. In August of that year, Peter Cooper’s Tom Thumb demonstrated the possibility of American-built steam power on the line. The Ellicott City Station, built in 1831 as a freight depot and later adapted for passengers, survives as the oldest railroad station in America and a landmark of the first thirteen miles of the B&O.
As an original founder of the B&O, Carroll’s role at the First Stone ceremony placed him at the center of this transformation. On the same date that Americans remembered independence, Baltimore presented a new vision of the republic’s future. The railroad was not merely a machine. It was a wager on speed, connection, trade, engineering, and national expansion.
A Landmark for Railroad History
The moment is significant because the B&O helped introduce a new transportation age. It matters because it shows Baltimore’s response to the economic threat posed by canals and rival ports. it was not simply a local depot, but part of a national experiment that began with immense uncertainty and ambition.
Last Signer: A Bridge Between Two American Beginnings
For those interested in Charles Carroll, the B&O's First Stone ceremony reveals the full shape of his life. He belonged to the generation that declared independence, but he also lived long enough to see independence translated into infrastructure. His public career ran from colonial grievance to revolutionary commitment, from Maryland convention politics to the Continental Congress, from state government to the United States Senate, and finally to the symbolic beginning of the B&O Railroad.
That is why Carroll deserves a large place in the July 4th story. Not just as a figure to be praised only in patriotic language, but as a man whose life helps explain what the American founding actually involved. It involved argument before independence, risk at independence, governance after independence, and long-term investment in the systems that would allow the country to grow.
July 4th is often remembered as a single day in 1776. Carroll’s life stretches that memory across time. In him, the Declaration connects to Maryland’s cautious road to independence, to the building of republican government, to the Patapsco Valley’s economic development, and to the railroad that would carry Baltimore’s ambitions westward.
The old man who placed the first stone of the B&O in 1828 was not simply a relic of the Revolution. He was a bridge between two American beginnings.
One beginning declared a nation.
The other helped set it in motion.
Discover more about Charles Carroll of Carrollton and the B&O Railroad:
I'll be speaking about Charles Carroll (at live events) throughout 2026 and 2027 to celebrate the 199th and 200th anniversaries of the B&O Railroad. Those presentations are free to attend.
Check out Charles Carroll of Carrollton: America’s First Entrepreneur (our inaugural Railroad History Reimagined project).
Make time to visit the B&O Ellicott City Station Museum. Completed in 1830, the station is America's oldest surviving railroad station. It even has a working model railroad miniaturization of the original thirteen mile route between Baltimore and Ellicott City.
See the B&O First Stone for yourself at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore. It is the birthplace of American railroading, where E. Francis Baldwin’s iconic Roundhouse still stands, and much more.