Independence Day is quickly approaching. Most of us will have the day off Friday. Fireworks will fill the air over places like Zebulon and Archer Lodge, Raleigh and Washington D.C.

But what do you know about the people who approved the Declaration of Independence, that document so celebrated on July 4 each year?

North Carolina was represented by three members in the assembly that approved the Declaration of Independence.

John Penn, Joseph Hewes and William Hooper represented North Carolina in that first Continental Congress.

According to Charles Goodrich, who wrote biographies of all the signers in his 1856 book “Lives of the Signers to the Declaration of Independence”, the three North Carolinians came to the meeting with greater leeway to represent their home state than representatives of any other state.

So who were these guys?

None of the three was born in North Carolina. Penn was a native of Virginia, Hooper came south from Massachusetts and Hewes came to North Carolina at age 30 from New Jersey.

Penn settled in Granville County, near present-day Stovall. He practiced law there until he was elected to the Continental Congress in 1775. He served successive terms until 1779.

Hewes came to power in Edenton, while Hooper made his mark in Wilmington.

Hewes joined the Continental Congress in 1774, when he was appointed to a committee assigned to state the rights of the colonies, the wrongs that had been done against them and what steps should be taken to right those wrongs.

But the Continental Congress was made up of a large number of men who, unlike the North Carolina contingent, couldn’t make decisions for their respective colonies.

And so, what could be called the first Declaration of Independence went by the wayside.

Hooper joined the Continental Congress in 1774 and served until 1777, but he nearly missed that colonial body’s biggest day.

Hooper returned to North Carolina to take care of some personal business and missed most of the 1776 session. He returned in time to take part in the debate, approval and signing of the fledgling nation’s first important document.

Two of the three men were lawyers, though Hooper practiced against the wishes of his preacher father who wanted him to follow in his professional footsteps. He later became a federal judge.

Hewes was a merchant, who did well in his native New Jersey before heading south.

The three transplanted Tar Heels came from roots as different the three geographic regions of the territory they represented.

Hewes gained his formal education at Princeton, while Hooper matriculated at Harvard. Penn was a self-taught barrister, having finished just two or three years of formal schooling before his father died when Penn was 19. Penn studied law at the foot of a noted lawyer and politician from Virginia before he made his way to North Carolina.

None of the North Carolina signers of the Declaration of Independence lived to see the 1800s. Hewes, the oldest of the three, died at the age of 49 in 1779. Penn died in 1788 at the age of 46 and Hooper outlasted them all, dying in 1790 at the age of 48.

None of the North Carolinians who signed the Declaration of Independence became as famous as some of their northern counterparts, but each more than carried his weight for his adopted home state.