At the head of the posting is a transcript of a bible register listing the names and dates of birth of the children of Andrew Pickens and Rebecca Calhoun. This transcript was published by Edward A. Claypool in The New England Historical and Genealogical Register 63,2 (April 1909), pp. 196-7. It notes that the bible at that time belonged to Mrs. F.A. Woodson of Denver, Colorado. Since the bible register has dates of birth, marriage, and death for members of the family of Andrew and Rebecca’s daughter Catherine Pickens Hunter, I think this is likely a bible that belonged to Catherine and her husband Dr. John Hunter, and that it either copied the dates of birth of Andrew and Rebecca’s children that had been recorded in a bible belonging to Andrew and Rebecca, or is Andrew and Rebecca’s family bible with Hunter family information added to the original register over the years. The date of birth of Ezekiel Pickens, who was born 30 March 1768, has been mistranscribed in this published transcript as 30 March 1763.

1. Mary Pickens was born 19 February 1766 in Granville (later Abbeville) County, South Carolina. On 22 February 1784 in Ninety-Six District (later Abbeville County), Mary married John Harris, son of John Harris and Mary Handy.

In an affidavit he gave in Anderson District, South Carolina, on 5 March 1833 as he applied for a pension for his Revolutionary service, John Harris stated that he was born on the eastern shore of Maryland in December 1762.[1] John Harris’s grave in Harrisburg plantation cemetery at Pendleton in Anderson County, South Carolina, is marked with two plaques placed on the grave in fairly recent years, which, if I understand correctly, are transcribing his dates of birth and death as they appeared on his original tombstone, which is no longer extant.[2] Both memorial plaques, one of which was placed by the local Andrew Pickens DAR chapter, give 6 December 1762 as John Harris’s date of birth.

At the time of John Harris’s birth, his father John Harris elder was pastor of a Presbyterian church at Snow Hill in Worcester County, Maryland, so it’s likely this is where John Harris younger was born.[3] John Harris’s father John Harris elder (1725-1790) graduated from Princeton University in 1753, and served Presbyterian churches in Maryland and Delaware before being sent by the synod to North Carolina in 1769. By 1772, he had settled in the Long Cane settlement of what eventually became Abbeville County, where he was an early pastor of several Presbyterian congregations including, as previously discussed, the Rocky River church to which members of the Calhoun family belonged.[4]

A survey book kept by Patrick Calhoun in the period 1784-1792, which is now found in the “John C. Calhoun Papers” of Clemson University Library’s Special Collections and Archives (mss 200), shows Patrick Calhoun surveying 100 acres of land in Ninety-Six District (later Abbeville County) for Rev^d. John Harris on 2 July 1784. The survey book notes that this land adjoined a Mr. Allen.

John Harris elder died testate in Abbeville County with an undated will proved 5 April 1791.[5] The will names John’s son John (who married Mary Pickens), leaving John Harris younger the tract of land on which he was then living. For reasons unclear to me — perhaps because John Harris younger named his Pendleton District (later Anderson County) plantation Harrisburg — a number of sources have claimed erroneously that John Harris younger was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and was son of a John Harris with wife Esther who operated a ferry at Harrisburg, with John younger founding the town.[6]

John Harris younger was a soldier of the American Revolution, serving under his wife’s cousins Alexander Noble and Joseph Calhoun as well as under his father-in-law Andrew Pickens. His pension file provides details of his service, including information about his having been shot in the head on the Savannah River while he was giving service, and having lost sight in his eye as a result.[7]

Following the war, John and Mary Pickens Harris settled in Pendleton District where they had a plantation near her parents’ Hopewell plantation on the Keowee River. The cemetery in which both are buried at Pendleton is the family cemetery of this plantation, which had the name Harrisburg.

In addition to farming, John was active in the political life of Pendleton District, serving as a member of the state convention of 1790, as sheriff for a period of time, and as ordinary of Pendleton and Anderson District for about forty years. He also maintained a medical practice.[8]

John Harris died 24 April 1845. A death notice published in the Pendleton Messenger on 2 May 1845 states that John was a “tried soldier of the Revolution” and was aged 84 when he died.[9] Prior to his death on 17 February 1845, John made a will naming his wife Mary and their children Andrew Pickens Harris, Nathaniel Harris, Joseph Pickens Harris, Rebecca Reese, Eliza C. Burns, John Harris, decd., Thomas Handy Harris, Benjamin Harris, Mary Noble, and Ezekiel Harris.[10]

Mary Pickens Harris died 27 May 1846. Notes in the Harris files in Leonardo Andrea’s genealogical collection state that an obituary of Mary appeared in the Pendleton Messenger on 17 June 1846, noting that she had been a member of the Presbyterian church for many years.[11]

I think Mary Pickens was likely named for her mother Rebecca’s sister Mary Calhoun Kerr, to whom Rebecca was close in age.

2. Ezekiel Pickens was born 30 March 1768 in Granville (later Abbeville), County, South Carolina. After his parents Andrew and Rebecca Calhoun Pickens moved from Abbeville County to their Hopewell plantation on the Keowee River in Pendleton District in 1786, Ezekiel’s father Andrew Pickens arranged for Ezekiel to be tutored by James Alexander Douglas, a Jesuit-trained Scot.[12] By 1788, Ezekiel had matriculated at Princeton, where he graduated third in his class in 1790 and was given the honor of presenting the valedictory address. In 1793, he was admitted to the bar in South Carolina and opened a law office in Charleston. On 4 February 1793 in Charleston, he married Elizabeth Bonneau, a sister of Floride Bonneau, whom Ezekiel’s uncle John Ewing Colhoun, also a lawyer, had married on 8 October 1786.[13]

From 1791-4, he served in the South Carolina House, representing Pendleton District. In 1801-2 he represented St. Thomas and St. Denis parishes in the South Carolina House, and from 1802-4, he was lieutenant-governor of South Carolina. Ezekiel served in the South Carolina Senate from 1806 to 1810.

As has previously been noted, when Ezekiel’s parents Andrew and Rebecca Calhoun Pickens moved from their Hopewell house in what’s now Pickens County in 1805 to Tamassee Creek in what became Oconee County, they gave Hopewell to Ezekiel and his brother Andrew Pickens, with Andrew living in the house into the 1820s. Ezekiel and his family lived in a house called the Cottage south of Hopewell.[14]

After having given birth to their son Samuel Bonneau Pickens on 9 February 1801, Ezekiel’s wife Elizabeth Bonneau Pickens died on 10 June 1803, and on 5 January 1807, he remarried to Elizabeth Barksdale, daughter of George Barksdale and Mary Daniel.

Ezekiel Pickens died 22 May 1813, having made a will in Anderson County identifying himself as Ezekiel Pickens of St. Thomas parish (in Charleston and Berkeley Counties) on 19 May 1813.[15] The will names Ezekiel’s wife Elizabeth and his children by both Elizabeth Bonneau and Elizabeth Barksdale, and mentions his plantations in both the lowcountry and upcountry, on any of which his widow Elizabeth could live following his demise. It made Ezekiel’s brother Andrew Pickens his executor along with Ezekiel’s wife Elizabeth and friends John Caldwell Calhoun of Abbeville and Samuel B. Jones of Charleston. Ezekiel had a double tie to John C. Calhoun, who was a first cousin of his mother Rebecca Calhoun Pickens and whose wife (and cousin) Floride Bonneau Colhoun was a daughter of Ezekiel’s uncle John Ewing Colhoun and of Floride Bonneau, sister to Ezekiel’s first wife Elizabeth Bonneau.

As the first son of Andrew Pickens and Rebecca Calhoun, Ezekiel Pickens was named for his mother’s father Ezekiel Calhoun. Ezekiel’s burial place is not known. In typewritten notes archived in the “Calhoun, Noble, and Pickens Families” collection at Clemson University Library’s Special Collections and Archives (box 1, mss 225), Mrs. Louis C. Hill states that Ezekiel and wife Elizabeth Bonneau Pickens were buried at Brickyard plantation in St. Thomas Parish in Berkeley County. According to Mrs. Hill, in February 1938, the lead coffin of Elizabeth washed up on the plantation and was reburied in the churchyard of nearby Pompion Hill church.

Mrs. Hill cites an eyewitness account by Edward von S. Dingle of Middleburg plantation, Huger, South Carolina, who reburied the coffin at Pompion Hill, and who stated that inside the lead coffin was a cypress casket with a silver heart-shaped plate stating that Elizabeth died 6 October 1803, aged 39 years and 7 months. The heart-shaped plate was wrapped in a newspaper from London dated 1803.

Ezekiel Pickens acquired the Brickyard plantation, a plantation of 2,470 acres in St. Thomas and St. Denis parishes, from Andrew Hasell, and it was his family’s primary lowcountry residence when they were not in the upcountry. The plantation adjoined Bonneau’s Ferry, the plantation of Elizabeth Bonneau’s father Samuel Bonneau, which passed to Elizabeth’s sister Floride and her husband John E. Colhoun (see N. Louise Bailey, Mary L. Morgan, and Carolyn R. Taylor, Biographical Directory of the South Carolina Senate, 1776-1985 [Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1986], p. 1270; John B. Irving, A Day on Cooper River {Charleston: A.E. Miller, 1842], pp. 51-2; and Henry A. M. Smith, “The Baronies of South Carolina,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, 18,1 [January 1917], p. 14).

The picture below is identified at multiple sites online as a portrait of Ezekiel Pickens, son of Andrew Pickens and Rebecca Calhoun, but it’s clear to me that this is a portrait of Ezekiel’s son Ezekiel Pickens (1794-1860), who was a judge in Selma, Alabama.

3. Ann Pickens was born 12 April 1770 in Ninety-Six District (later Abbeville County), South Carolina. This birthdate is stated in Ann’s obituary in the Pensacola Gazette, which was carried by The Abbeville Press and Banner on 8 April 1846 following her death in Pensacola on 20 March 1846.[16] In 1792, Ann married John Simpson, son of John Simpson Sr. and Ann Remer (or Remar). John Simpson younger was born in 1768, according to his tombstone in St. Michael’s cemetery in Pensacola, Escambia County, Florida, which states that John Simpson was 57 years old when he died in Pensacola on 16 October 1825.[17]

John Simpson’s father John Simpson Sr. was a Princeton graduate (class of 1763) and Presbyterian minister, who was sent in 1772 by the synod of New York and Philadelphia to minister in Virginia and North Carolina, and who by 1774 was pastoring Fishing Creek Presbyterian church in Chester, South Carolina.[18] In 1790 he became pastor of Roberts and Good Hope Presbyterian churches in Pendleton District, South Carolina.

Note the recurring pattern of marriages of children of Andrew Pickens and Rebecca Calhoun to spouses with ties to the Presbyterian ministry and Princeton University: as we’ve seen (above), Ann Pickens’ sister Mary married John Harris, whose father was a Princeton-educated Presbyterian minister serving churches in the Long Cane settlement, and as we’ll see in a moment, Ann and Mary’s sister Jane married John Henry Miller, whose father was a Presbyterian minister. As we’ve also seen, Ann and Mary’s first cousin Catherine Kerr married Hugh Macklin/McLin, whose uncle Robert Macklin was also a Presbyterian minister in the Long Cane settlement. And as noted above, Ezekiel Pickens, a brother of Ann and Mary Pickens, also graduated from Princeton, as did the uncle of these Pickens siblings, John Ewing Colhoun.

John Simpson and Ann Pickens lived in Pendleton District, South Carolina, for the first years of their marriage, and around 1814, moved their family to the Blackwater River in Escambia County, Florida, where, in 1820, John built a sawmill, the Woodbine Mill, on the Simpson River, which empties into Escambia Bay at Pensacola.[19]

Ann Pickens Simpson died at Pensacola, Florida, on 20 March 1846 and is buried with her husband John Simpson in St. Michael’s cemetery at Pensacola.[20] Her previously cited obituary published in the Pensacola Gazette and carried by newspapers in Charleston and Abbeville contains valuable biographical information.[21] It reads as follows:

DIED, at Pensacola, Fla., on the 20^th ult, Mrs. Ann Pickens Simpson, born on the 12^th April, in the year of our Lord, 1770. Her native place was Abbeville District, S.C.

She was the daughter of Gen. Andrew Pickens Simpson [sic], so highly and deservedly celebrated as a commander in the American forces, during our revolutionary struggle with Great Britain, and the most distinguished hero in the battle of the Cowpens.

Her mother was Miss Rebecca Calhoun, daughter of Ezekiel Calhoun, sister of John E. Calhoun, who died while in Congress—and cousin of John C. Calhoun, present Senator from South Carolina.

After having been educated in her native State, she was married to John Simpson, her first and only husband, at the age of 22 years. With him she lived 45 years; and became the mother of 7 children, two daughters and five sons; the youngest of whom died at the age of two years. The remainder still live—Pensacola Gazette.

Ann Pickens was named, I’m fairly certain, for her paternal grandmother Ann Davis Pickens.

4. Son Pickens was born 12 January 1772 and died in infancy.

5. Jane Pickens was born in March 1773 in Ninety-Six District (later Abbeville County), South Carolina, and died 27 October 1773 in the same place. In addition to the bible register transcribed at the head of this posting, on this child of Andrew and Rebecca, see sources cited in this footnote.[22] Monroe Pickens’ history of the Pickens family gives this infant daughter the name Jane Bonneau Pickens, a name that, if correct, would be replicated when Andrew and Rebecca Pickens named their next child with the same name.[23]

As a previous posting notes, in a letter he sent on 28 August 1811 to General Henry Lee, Andrew Pickens tells Lee that his parents came to Pennsylvania from Ireland, but also states that his Pickens family had been in France at some point back in time.[24] Pickens family historians Lois K. Nix and Mary Kay Snell recount traditions handed down in the Pickens family of the U.S. which suggest that a Pickens ancestor, Robert Picken, went from Scotland to France, where he held a diplomatic post during the reign of Henry IV (1589-1610).[25] Robert is said to have returned to Scotland after 1610, having a son Andrew born in 1624 who then went to France as early as 1651, after Cromwell defeated Charles II. Andrew’s son Robert was born in France in 1654, marrying a widow Esther Jeanne Benoit Bonneau of Rochelle, France, according to these family stories.

If there is any validity to these stories as captured by Nix and Snell, then the name Bonneau may have appeared in the family tree of Andrew Pickens through this marriage of Robert Pickens to Esther Jeanne Benoit (Bonneau), and this may be why the name was then given to two daughters of Andrew Pickens and Rebecca Calhoun. If there is a Bonneau connection in the Pickens family, then that connection makes the marriage of Rebecca Calhoun Pickens’ brother John Ewing Colhoun to a woman of French Huguenot descent, Floride Bonneau, in 1786, and the marriage of Andrew and Rebecca Pickens’ son Ezekiel to Floride’s sister Elizabeth in 1793, all the more interesting.

6. Jane Bonneau Pickens (the second child of this name, apparently, if Monroe Pickens is correct) was born 9 November 1774 in Ninety-Six District (later Abbeville County), South Carolina. This date of birth is inscribed on Jane’s tombstone in Pontotoc cemetery at Pontotoc in Pontotoc County, Mississippi.[26]

The Find a Grave memorial page for Jane to which I’ve just pointed you will tell you that it appears the Jane Bonneau Pickens who married Dr. John Henry Miller was not the daughter of Andrew Pickens and Rebecca Calhoun, and that Andrew and Rebecca’s daughter Jane was the child born in March 1773. This source has that older Jane marrying James Wilkinson.

I have no idea why the memorial page of Jane Bonneau Pickens contains these statements, when there’s abundant information showing that Jane Bonneau Pickens, daughter of Andrew Pickens and Rebecca Calhoun, married Dr. John Henry Miller. First and foremost, there’s the evidence of the family bible register whose transcript was published in 1909 (see above), and which shows Andrew and Rebecca with a daughter Jane born 9 November 1774, the same date of birth given on the tombstone of Jane Bonneau Pickens Miller.

Also, as noted above, Jane’s sister Jane who was born in March 1773 died as an infant; she did not marry James Wilkinson. One source after another tells us that Andrew and Rebecca Calhoun Pickens had a daughter Jane who married Dr. John Henry Miller, son of a Scottish-born Presbyterian minister, Robert Miller, about whom I’ll say more in a moment. In a 1903 biography of John Henry Miller, the son of John Henry Miller and Jane Pickens, J.G. Deupree states that Dr. John Henry Miller, son of Robert Miller, a Scottish-born minister, practiced medicine in Abbeville County, South Carolina, and married Jane Pickens, daughter of General Andrew Pickens.[27] Deupree also notes that John Henry Miller and wife Jane Pickens Miller attended Long Cane Presbyterian church in Abbeville County.

Another biography of John Henry Miller, son of the elder John and Jane Pickens, by Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes states that John Henry Jr. was the son of John Henry Miller and Jane Pickens, and that he was a grandson of General Andrew Pickens.[28]

Jane Bonneau Pickens’ husband Dr. John Henry Miller was born 16 November 1777 in Ninety-Six District (later Abbeville County, South Carolina), son of Robert Miller and Jean/Jane Pickens.[29] John’s mother Jean/Jane Pickens was a sister of Andrew Pickens. John Henry Miller and Rebecca Bonneau Pickens were first cousins.  

Presbyterian records in South Carolina contain fascinating information about Robert Miller. This story is recounted in detail in George Howe’s history of the Presbyterian church in South Carolina.[30] Howe notes that the Presbyterian church in the Waxhaws on the border of North and South Carolina entered into a union with Fishing Creek Presbyterian church in 1756, placing itself under the presbytery of Charleston. Since the Waxhaws congregation needed a minister and wanted one from Scotland, if possible, it had invited Robert Miller, a Scottish-born schoolmaster, to visit the settlement in 1755, and then issued a call to the Charleston presbytery for Robert Miller to be ordained and made the minister at Waxhaws.

The Charleston presbytery licensed Robert Miller to preach on 7 February 1756. It was then found, however, that he had been deposed by a Scottish presbytery for violating the seventh commandment (that is, he had had been living with and having children by a woman to whom he was not married), and at a presbytery meeting in Charleston on 22 June 1758, Miller was deposed from his position as the Waxhaws pastor and excommunicated. Though he expressed repentance and a Presbyterian congregation that subsequently formed in the Long Cane settlement — Long Cane Presbyterian — sought to have him made pastor there, the presbytery did not permit this.

A website entitled “Miller and Reid Families of Parks Creek” that was previously online and maintained by Bob Thompson had additional valuable information about Robert Miller. This site cited an autobiographical sketch written by Robert Miller in which he stated that he had been schooled at Patrick Reid’s school in Aberdeen, and had been born in Aberdeenshire. The autobiographical statement says that his unnamed father had valuable landholdings. At age eighteen, Robert apprenticed himself to a physician and then enrolled in a university assumed to be the University of Edinburgh. It appears that while he was at university, he studied divinity and was then ordained, apparently by the Edinburgh presbytery. He was then at some point deposed for his familiarity with a woman in his congregation.

Bob Thompson’s biography of Robert Miller says that he came to the colonies in or around 1750 and traces of him are found in several Presbyterian congregations of the South Carolina lowcountry before he was ordained to serve the Waxhaws congregation in 1756. At this point he connected with the Pickens family in the Waxhaws. Bob Thompson thinks that Robert Miller married Jean/Jane Pickens in January or February 1757, and he cites a 22 February 1758 deed in which Robert and Jean gave land for the use of the Presbyterian church in the Waxhaws. By 1765, with members of the Pickens family, Robert Miller and wife Jean Pickens Miller moved from the Waxhaws to the Long Cane settlement.[31]

McPherson’s history of the Calhoun, Hamilton, Baskin, and related families states that John Henry Miller and Jane Bonneau Pickens married in Abbeville County on 8 January 1805 and then moved about 1819 from South Carolina to the vicinity of Valley Creek church near Selma in Dallas County, Alabama, moving from there to Pontotoc, Mississippi, where John Henry Miller and Jane Bonneau Pickens Miller died and are buried.[32] As a previous posting notes, Calhoun and Pickens family letters show Jane’s brothers Andrew and Joseph Pickens, with their nephew Ezekiel Pickens, all contemplating a move from South Carolina to Alabama in 1819, so it appears that if the move of the Millers to Alabama occurred in 1819, it was part of a family migration. Jane’s brother Andrew moved on from Dallas County, Alabama, to Pontotoc County, Mississippi, as Jane and husband John Henry Miller did. In addition to Jane and husband John Henry Miller and Jane’s brother Andrew, Jane and Andrew’s sistes Margaret (with husband George Bowie) and Catherine (with husband John Hunter) and their nephew Ezekiel Pickens also settled in Dallas County, Alabama.

The tombstones of John Henry Miller and Jane Pickens Miller in Pontotoc cemetery state that John died 7 October 1851 and Jane died 28 March 1848. The previously cited “Miller and Reid Families of Parks Creek” of Bob Thompson had a transcript of a 7 May 1848 letter from Jane’s niece Zilpha Hughes McGinty to Susan Miller of Pontotoc County, Mississippi, speaking of the recent death of Zilpha’s aunt Jane. The letter states,

How sorry I was to hear of the death of Aunt Jane. Though we have been expecting it for some time, yet I hoped she would recover for I was so anxious to see her and lived in hope something would turn up that I would get to go to Pontotoc before her death…. Poor Aunt. She is gone to a better world I hope where there is no more suffering and she had her share of it here, and expect bore it with a great deal of fortitude.

Zilpha McGinty was a daughter of Felix Hughes and Margaret Miller, Margaret being a sister of John Henry Miller. Zilpha married Bertram G. McGinty. Susan Miller was a daughter of Ebenezer Miller, another sibling of John Henry Miller. Felix Hughes is discussed in a previous posting.

I have notes stating that Dr. John Henry Miller was a graduate of Hampden-Sydney College, but do not have an indication of the source of that information.

---

[1] NARA, Case Files of Pension and Bounty-Land Warrant Applications Based on Revolutionary War Service, compiled ca. 1800 – ca. 1912, documenting the period ca. 1775 – ca. 1900, RG 15, file of John Harris, South Carolina, S21808, available digitally at Fold3.

[2] See Find a Grave memorial page of Dr. John Harris II, Harrisburg plantation cemetery, Pendleton, Anderson County, South Carolina, created by Trails of History with memorial plaque photos by Trails of History and L N M W H.

[3] See “An Historic Church and Others on the Eastern Shore,” Presbyterian of the South (28 March 1917), p. 3, col. 1.

[4] Valuable biographical information about John Harris appears in James McLachlan, Princetonians, 1748-1768: A Biographical Dictionary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 71-2. On John Harris as the first pastor of the Rocky River church, see H.C. Fennel, “Rocky River Church as It Was Organized in 1764—As It Exists in 1887,” The Abbeville Press and Banner (25 May 1887), p. 4, col. 3-6. See also notes in Leonardo Andrea’s Harris folders (no. 378-9) in the Leonardo Andrea Collection, which state that Rev. John Harris came to the Carolinas as a Presbyterian pastor from Snow Hill, Maryland.

[5] Abbeville County, South Carolina, Will Bk. 1, pp. 40-1; Abbeville County, South Carolina, loose papers estate files box 107, pkg. 2895.

[6] See Yates Snowden, History of South Carolina, vol. 5 (Lewis: Chicago and New York, 1920), pp. 173-4; and Louise Ayer Vandiver, Traditions and History of Anderson County (Atlanta: Ruralist, 1928), pp. 76-77.

[7] See supra, n. 1. See also Monroe Pickens, Cousin Monroe’s History of the Pickens Family (Easley, South Carolina: Day, 1951), p. 41; and Lewin Dwinnell McPherson, Calhoun, Hamilton, Baskin, and Related Families (1957), p. 51.

[8] Vandiver, Traditions and History of Anderson County, p. 77.

[9] Leonardo Andrea’s Harris folders (no. 378-9) in the Leonardo Andrea Collection contain abstracts of the death notice, and it’s also abstracted in part at his Find a Grave memorial page: see supra, n. 2.

[10] Anderson District, South Carolina, Will Bk. 1, pp, 204-5.

[11] See supra, n. 4.

[12] Ruth L. Woodward and Wesley Frank Craven, Princetonians, 1784-1790: A Biographical Dictionary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 514.

[13] Ibid., and “Lt. Gov. Ezekiel Pickens ‘The Cottage’” at Clemson University’s website. See also “Ezekiel Pickens” at Wikipedia.

[14] Pendleton District Historical and Recreational Commission, Pendleton Historic District: A Survey (Pendleton, South Carolina: Pendleton District Historical and Recreational Commission, 1973), pp. 20-1; and “Lt. Gov. Ezekiel Pickens ‘The Cottage.’” The latter source has a photo of the Cottage taken in the late 1930s before the house was razed.

[15] Anderson County, South Carolina, Will Bk. 1791-1834, pp. 160-1.

[16] The Abbeville Press and Banner (8 April 1846), p. 3, col. 4. Also published in Charleston Daily Courier (3 April 1846), p. 2, col. 5.

[17] See Find a Grave memorial page of John Simpson Jr., St. Michael’s cemetery, Pensacola, Escambia County, Florida, created by Kathy Nance, maintained by Bob Nance, with tombstone photos by MIC and Claire.

[18] Samuel Davies Alexander, Princeton College During the Eighteenth Century (New York: Randolph, 1872), pp. 88-9; and William Nelson, ed., Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New Jersey, vol. 24 (Paterson, New Jersey: Call, 1902), p. 256. 

[19] Jessica Stice, “Legacy of Simpson family rooted in American history,” Pensacola News Journal (21 May 2006), p. 26, col. 2-4; and Brian Rucker, “Arcadia and Bagdad: Industrial Parks of Antebellum Florida,” The Florida Historical Quarterly 67,2 (October 1988), pp. 147-165.

[20] See Find a Grave memorial page of Anne Pickens Simpson, St. Michael’s cemetery, Pensacola, Escambia County, Florida, created by Kathy Nance, maintained by Bob Nance, with tombstone photos by MIC and Claire.

[21] See supra, n. 16.

[22] See e.g., “Hopewell Plantation,” at the website of Clemson University.

[23] Monroe Pickens, Cousin Monroe’s History of the Pickens Family, p. 40.

[24] The original letter is in the Thomas Sumter Papers, 1763-1885, of the Lyman Draper Manuscript Collection held by Wisconsin Historical Society—series VV, volume 1.

[25] Lois K. Nix and Mary Kay Snell, Thomas Boon Pickens (1928-), His Ancestors (Amarillo: Typhos, 1989), pp. 3-5.

[26] See Find a Grave memorial page for Jane Bonneau Pickens Miller, Pontotoc cemetery, Pontotoc, Pontotoc County, Mississippi, created by Michelle Woodham, with tombstone photos by Michelle Woodham and Lynn Brooks Ellis.

[27] J.G. Deupree, “Reminiscences of Service with the First Mississippi Cavalry,” Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society 7 (1903), pp. 95-6. Deupree says that is citing a biography written some years prior to 1903 by Presbyterian minister T. Dwight Witherspoon and published in the St. Louis Presbyterian. See also Rod Andrew, The Life and Times of General Andrew Pickens Revolutionary War Hero, American Founder (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), p. 293, which states that Jane, daughter of Andrew Pickens and Rebecca Calhoun, married John Henry Miller, son of Reverend Robert Miller and Jane Pickens. Finally, see Rev. J.D. Bailey, “Some Kings Mt. Commanders: Benjamin Cleveland,” Gaffney [South Carolina] Ledger (25 April 1925), p. 5, col. 2, stating that Mrs. Jane Miller, daughter of General Andrew Pickens, recounted that the Pickens family feared visits from Colonel Cleveland when the family lived at its Hopewell house, because Cleveland was such an enormous man in his elder years that the Pickens family feared their beds would not accommodate his weight.

[28] Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes, Yale’s Confederates, a Biographical Dictionary (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008) pp. 144-5.

[29] See Find a Grave memorial page of Dr. John Henry Miller, Pontotoc cemetery Pontotoc County, Mississippi, created by Michelle Woodham, with tombstone photos by Michelle Woodham and Lynn Brooks Ellis. The tombstone has John Henry Miller’s date of birth inscribed on it.

[30] George Howe, History of the Presbyterian Church in South Carolina, vol. 1 (Columbia: Duffie & Chapman, 1870), pp. 285-290.

[31] See also “The Millers and allied families of the Long Cane Settlement (South Carolina),” at the Wilson Family Tree Album Blog, sharing research done by William Floyd Wilson and his wife Eula Claudine Reed. This source notes that, in addition to Monroe Pickens in his Cousin Monroe’s History of the Pickens Family (pp. 55, 75-6), the Miller files of the Leonardo Andrea Collection contain information about Robert Miller, based on research done by William Calvin Wells III of Jackson, Mississippi, a descendant of John Henry Miller and Jane Bonneau Pickens.

[32] McPherson, Calhoun, Hamilton, Baskin, and Related Families, pp. 52-3.