Settling the South Carolina Backcountry

In tracing three generations of a family in the South Carolina backcountry, Nancy Pressly explores how the communities along Hard Labor Creek, located at the crossroads of several major wagon routes, evolved from a newly settled frontier in the 1760s to a remarkable center of wealth and power in the decades before the Civil War. The author presents the compelling story of a close-knit, rural farming community of mainly Scotch-Irish settlers, where intermarriages over several generations created interconnected kinship groups. These alliances grew into a vital economic force as yeoman farmers became entrepreneurial planters and slave owners and their children remarkably successful lawyers, physicians, merchants, politicians, and clergy.