Settling the South Carolina Backcountry

The Pressly Family and Life Along Hard Labor Creek, 1767-1850

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.

The lives of the Presslys and other families, such as the Hearsts, who were ancestors of William Randolph Hearst, revolved around the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, which nourished a faith rooted in conservative, old-world Seceder beliefs and the singing of psalms. Over generations many Presslys became distinguished clergymen, educators, and theologians whose deeply pious connections to the church were linked to an intellectual understanding of the scriptures. The author of this generously illustrated text is an art historian and writer who lives in Atlanta, Georgia.