Andrew Pickens

Andrew Pickens (September 13, 1739August 11, 1817) was a militia leader in the American Revolution. A planter and slaveowner, he developed his Hopewell plantation on the east side of the Keowee River across from the Cherokee town of Isunigu (Seneca) in western South Carolina. He was elected as a member of the United States House of Representatives from western South Carolina. Several treaties with the Cherokee were negotiated and signed at his plantation of Hopewell. Early life Pickens was born in 1739 in Bucks County in the Province of Pennsylvania. He was the son of Scots-Irish immigrants, Presbyterians of primarily Scottish ancestry from Carrickfergus in County Antrim, Ireland (in what is today Northern Ireland.) His parents were Andrew Pickens Sr. and Anne (née Davis). But his paternal great-grandparents were ethnic French Huguenots: Robert Andrew Pickens (Robert André Picon) had migrated to England and Northern Ireland; his wife Esther-Jeanne, widow Bonneau, was from La Rochelle, France and had settled in South Carolina along with other Huguenot refugees fleeing religious persecution as Protestants. His family traveled the Great Wagon Road in the Shenandoah Valley in hopes of finding a new home. Records show they first settled in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. In 1752, his family moved to the Waxhaws on the South Carolina frontier. Move to frontier South Carolina Pickens sold his farm there in 1764 and bought land in Abbeville County, South Carolina, near the Georgia border. He married Rebecca Calhoun there and they started a family. In addition to meeting other ethnic Scots-Irish and new immigrants to the area, he became acquainted with his Cherokee neighbors. He built a blockhouse as a base for training.