SCIway interviewed Gretchen Huggins, who is a member of the prominent Richardson family of South Carolina, and she told us a few stories about the history of her family and General Richard Richardson.

The Richardson family is significant to South Carolina for several reasons. For starters, it has been responsible six of our state governors!

The family's founder, Brigadier General Richard Richardson, arrived in South Carolina in the 1730s. A surveyor by trade, he immigrated from Virginia, established himself as a planter at Big Home in Clarendon County, and, among many other civil and military accomplishments, served valiantly as a patriot in the Revolutionary War.

Most notably, Richardson commanded the important Snow Campaign of 1775, in which the Americans squelched Tory sympathies in the back country of our state, unifying this region of South Carolina for the long fight ahead. Four years later, the war still raging, Richardson retired from the army at age 76. Soon after, the notorious Lord Charles Cornwallis, who found himself with remarkably fewer friends than he'd had five years earlier, sought to buy Richardson's allegiance for the British crown. Richardson refused with flourish, which you can hear his descendant Gretchen Huggins read his response to Cornwallis in this interview.