Settling the South Carolina Backcountry

Description

Author Nancy Pressly examines how Scotch-Irish communities between Long Cane Creek and Hard Labor Creek in Abbeville District, near 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. In tracing several generations of a family in the South Carolina backcountry, Pressly presents the compelling story of a close-knit, rural farming community where intermarriages among settlers, many of whom were Associate Reformed Presbyterians over several generations created interconnected kinship groups. These alliances grew into a vital economic force as yeoman farmers became entrepreneurial planters and their children remarkably successful lawyers, physicians, merchants, politicians, and clergy.  The book also examines the extraordinary contributions of the Pressly family, who embraced the value of education and who, as educators, theologians and ministers, were to influence profoundly generations to come.