John McCord was a thirteen-year-old boy who lived in the Long Canes area of Abbeville County. The McCords were Scots-Irish immigrants who had come to Abbeville by way of Virginia and were in favor of independence from Great Britain.

Despite his young age, John was eager to join the cause of freedom, and in the summer of 1776, he volunteered for service under Captain Joseph Pickens, the brother of Andrew Pickens. Captain Joseph Pickens noted that John was “both young and slender of frame” and that he would prefer the boy to “give up his rifle and powder horn” to a more experienced soldier and instead serve the cause by procuring provisions, shelling corn for the troops, watching over the supplies, caring for the sick, supervising prisoners, and carrying messages.

John agreed to serve in this capacity until he came of age, and after a few years he performed a tour of duty under Captain Moses Liddell, then became part of a corps tasked with guarding the blockhouse at Fort Pickens (which was located just off the Square), and then John joined a special bodyguard unit for Andrew Pickens to accompany him to Tolls Station on the Saluda River.

George Cameron was the eldest child of British Indian Agent Alexander Cameron and his Cherokee wife, Molly. Born in 1762, he was beloved by his Cherokee kin, who gifted him a tract of land that was twelve miles square when he was just six.

As he grew older, he became more significant to the Cherokees. Oconostota, a tribal leader, saw him as a living symbol of the unity that could exist between the Cherokee and the settlers, telling Alexander Cameron that “we are desirous that [you] educate the boy like the white people, so that he may resemble both white and red, and live among us when his father is dead.”

Unfortunately, the tension between the settlers and the Cherokees had reached a boiling point during the early days of the Revolution, causing the Second Cherokee War and creating a two-front conflict in the backcountry as fighting grew between the settlers, the British, and the Native peoples. After his father was accused of instigating attacks on settlers, George and his family had to flee Abbeville.

He sailed to England to be educated, and as far as records show, he did not return to America. The hopeful future that he had represented to his Cherokee kin did not come to fruition; when the Treaty of DeWitt’s Corner ended the Second Cherokee War, it also pushed the Cherokees virtually out of South Carolina.

Susannah was the daughter of Alexander Cameron and his Cherokee wife, Molly. Born in 1770, she was still a child when the American Revolution came to the backcountry of Abbeville and changed the lives of the Cameron family of Lochaber Plantation, uprooting them from their home and forcing them to hide from angry local Patriots. 

Some accounts suggest that Susannah also went to England to be educated along with her brother George, but others say that Molly Cameron and her two daughters traveled to the West Indies to wait out the war. Regardless, Susannah did end up in the Bahamas at some point after the war, and records indicate that she married a Bahamian doctor named John Guerineau.

Together, they had two children, Sarah and William. Dr. Guerineau seems to have died in 1801, and Susannah traveled back to America with her children and resumed living among the Cherokees with her mother.

In 1817, the federal government began its initiative to remove the Cherokees from the Southeast, offering them land out west in exchange for leaving. Susannah applied for a piece of this land, but the State of Georgia seems to have disqualified her from ownership–she filed a claim for the loss in 1837.

During her life, Susannah experienced the American Revolution, the Second Cherokee War, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and the beginning of the Trail of Tears. She died in 1840.

Mary Conway’s life changed forever when the Revolutionary War came to the backcountry of Abbeville. She was only six when the war began in 1775, and when the South became the focal point of the conflict in 1780, fighting was spread across the state of South Carolina.

In Abbeville, Mary would have experienced the deep divisions and violence between Loyalists and Patriots since she was part of a Tory family. In 1781, Mary was living with her older brother, William. Their parents were both dead, and she depended on him as her guardian.

William Conway was one of the Loyalist dragoons serving under Major James Dunlap, and on March 23rd both William and her uncle Samuel were involved in the fighting at the Battle of Dunlap’s Defeat. Unfortunately for Mary, William was one of the casualties, leaving her an orphan at twelve.

Her uncle, Samuel Hill, became her guardian, and they traveled as refugees to Charleston, and after the British Army evacuated, they boarded a ship for Jamaica, a British-controlled territory. Samuel Hill later went to England on her behalf to present a deposition to the Crown for compensation for her, but she still lost large amounts of the estate she had inherited from her brother after his passing.

James Beard was the young son of a Patriot family who accompanied his father on a trip to watch over a convoy of wagons of supplies that were headed to Andrew Pickens’ blockhouse at Fort Pickens in Abbeville. Although the convoy was meant to be a secret, the group was surprised by a band of Loyalist soldiers led by John Crawford. Some of the Patriots were killed, but most were rounded up as captives. Crawford burned the wagons and sold his captives to the Cherokees.

James Beard and his father had survived the initial attack, but now faced a worse fate. The Cherokee tortured the captives, killing most of them, including James’ father.  The Cherokees took pity on James and spared him, “because he was a boy.” They did take his clothing and left him in the elements, but the boy had been injured during his time as a prisoner and later wrote of the “pains in his knees and ankles” that rendered him lame, unable to walk.

In 1792, he was granted an annuity for his suffering, with the Senate Committee who judged his application writing “that the very peculiar and disturbing circumstances of his situation” warranted the same payment given to other soldiers who had been disabled in state service.