Where The Roots of the Foster Family Run Deepest
The Pacolet River country of the South Carolina upcountry — home to the Fosters and many allied families the families turned the tide of war and put down roots.
Union Co. SC was the springboard west for this branch of Fosters
The Indian Country Before the Settlers
Before the Scots-Irish came down the Great Wagon Road, before the first white family drove a stake into the red clay of the Carolina upcountry, this was a world shaped by two great peoples in complicated relationship with each other and with the land. The Cherokee held the high country to the northwest — the Blue Ridge, the river valleys threading down from the Appalachian ridge — and used the rolling Piedmont that would become Union County as hunting ground, a vast middle distance between their mountain towns and the tidewater world to the southeast. The Catawba occupied the country further east, along the river that bore their name, a nation already diminished by disease and war but still a force to be reckoned with. Between them and along the Broad and Pacolet rivers, the upcountry was a contested, alive, and consequential place long before any European thought to name it.
Places Like Union County
The first Scots-Irish settlers arrived around 1751 — James McIlwaine and a party of Protestants from Virginia and Pennsylvania, following the same general impulse that drove the whole Great Wagon Road migration: too many people behind them, too little land, and the standing offer of something better ahead. They brought their Presbyterianism and their cattle and their capacity for the particular kind of stubborn, self-sufficient farming that the upcountry demanded. By 1763, when the Seven Years' War ended and the floodgates opened, thousands were coming every year — down the Wagon Road from Philadelphia through the Shenandoah Valley and into the Carolina Piedmont, Scots-Irish and German Reformed and Welsh Baptist, quadrupling the European population of the South Carolina backcountry in barely a decade. Union County — formally established in 1785, carved from the Ninety-Six District, named for Union Church which itself had been named for the union of different Protestant congregations — was the product of that wave.
The Bargain the Lowcountry Made
There is an uncomfortable truth at the centre of the upcountry settlement story, and it is worth naming plainly. The wealthy planters of the South Carolina lowcountry — the rice lords of the tidal rivers around Charleston and Beaufort, men whose fortunes rested entirely on enslaved labour — had a specific interest in populating the upcountry. They wanted a population there that would buffer their world from two directions at once: from the Cherokee and Catawba to the northwest, who had every reason to resent the encroachment on their territory, and from their own enslaved people, who ran when they could and needed to be caught when they ran. A white population in the upcountry served both purposes.
What the lowcountry planters were rather less interested in was providing the infrastructure that population needed to survive and thrive. The upcountry in the years before the Revolution had almost no courts, no churches beyond what the settlers built themselves, no roads worthy of the name, no formal land titles in many cases, and no effective government. The settlers who broke ground along Sandy Run and the Pacolet and the Tyger rivers were, in effect, a volunteer buffer force — invited in by a political class that wanted them there for specific reasons and was prepared to offer them, in return, very little beyond the land itself. It made for a particular kind of community: proud, self-reliant, suspicious of distant authority, deeply competent at managing without help, and fully aware that nobody was going to come if things went wrong.
Out of that calculus emerged the families of the Pacolet valley. Welsh blacksmiths and Scots-Irish farmers and English traders, building churches and mills and blacksmith shops with their own hands, developing the networks of kinship and neighbourhood that would sustain them through the Revolution and after it. They were tough people by necessity. The land asked that of them, and the political situation confirmed it.
Carroll, Grindal, and a Community Takes Shape
The name itself records the two men who came before the Jaspers and the Fosters. Richard Carroll was the first European settler at the shoals, arriving around 1751 and receiving a land grant in 1752 — his name attached to the crossing in the early years as Carroll's Shoals, or Carroll's Ford. John Grindal followed not long after, eventually accumulating some 330 acres on both sides of the Pacolet through North Carolina colonial grants. Grindal ran a trading post here — supplying the hunters, the over-the-mountain men, and the Indian traders who moved through this crossing — and operated a mill capable not only of grinding grain but of manufacturing gunpowder, which in the 1760s and 1770s was a strategic commodity in a country where the Cherokee still contested European settlement. By the time of the Revolution, the ford was known as Grindall's Ford and the shoals bore his name.
Into this established community — a trading post, a mill, a crossing already known to a generation of travellers — John Andrew Jasper arrived around 1771. A Welsh-born blacksmith who had worked his way from Carmarthenshire to Pennsylvania to Virginia before following the Wagon Road south, Jasper established himself on Sandy Run near the shoals and became one of the founding figures of the district. His forge served the community. His family married into the Moseleys and the Georges and the McWhorters and the Hames, weaving the neighbourhood together through kinship and craft. When General Daniel Morgan came looking for a place to encamp his Continental Army in the winter of 1780, it was Grindal Shoals he chose — the ford, the hillock, the view, and the network of patriot families who would feed his men and shoe his horses and guide his scouts.
Christie's Tavern and the Social World of the Shoals
The colonial upcountry organized its social life around a small number of fixed points — the church, the mill, the court day, and the tavern. Christie's Tavern, which stood near the Grindal Shoals crossing, was one of those fixed points: a place where travellers stopped, where men gathered for news and argument and the occasional dram, where the community's semi-public life took place in the era before formal institutions had caught up with the speed of settlement. William Gilmore Simms set his 1835 Revolutionary War novel *Horseshoe Robinson* in exactly this kind of backcountry tavern world — the plot turning on Whig and Tory neighbors using the same public house, their loyalties at odds and their social world intact — and the world he describes is recognizable as the world of Grindal Shoals: neighbors who knew each other too well to avoid each other, a community fractured by the Revolution but still, underneath it, one community.
The Tory and Patriot divide in Union County was not a simple north-south affair. It ran through families and farms and neighbourhoods in ways that a later generation found hard to understand. Men who had been neighbours for twenty years found themselves on opposite sides of a war being fought in their own backyards. The loyalists — those who supported the Crown, either from genuine attachment or from a calculation that the British were going to win — were a substantial presence in the upcountry, perhaps a third of the population at the war's beginning. When the British took Charleston in 1780 and Cornwallis moved his forces into the interior, for a time it looked as though they might be right.
Morgan at Grindal Shoals
The winter of 1780–81 was the pivot point. Daniel Morgan, a Continental brigadier general from Virginia with a genius for irregular warfare, came south in December 1780 with 600 men and the assignment of threatening British posts in the upcountry and keeping Cornwallis off balance. He chose Grindal Shoals as his base of operations. For twenty days he camped there, recruiting local militia, gathering intelligence from the patriot families of Sandy Run, and planning his response to Banastre Tarleton, the British cavalry commander who had made himself feared — and hated — across the Carolina backcountry.
Cowpens: The Battle That Changed the War
Morgan moved his men to Cowpens on January 16, 1781, and the next morning arranged them with a tactical cunning that military historians still teach: militia in front to fire two volleys and then fall back as if retreating, drawing Tarleton's charging cavalry and infantry onto the steady fire of the Continental regulars behind them, then a perfectly timed wheeling maneuver that closed the trap. Tarleton lost more than 800 men in forty-five minutes. It was one of the most complete victories of the entire war, and it was planned at Grindal Shoals, executed with the help of men who had grown up in sight of the Pacolet River.
Among the militia who delivered that victory were men of the 2nd Spartan Regiment — Colonel Thomas Brandon's Fair Forest Regiment, raised in the Tyger and Pacolet river country — who served under General Andrew Pickens in the Carolina militia line. Brandon's men had been fighting in this upcountry for months; Cowpens was the victory they had been working toward.
Musgrove's Mill
Before Cowpens there was Musgrove's Mill, in August 1780, where a patriot force ambushed a British and Loyalist column at a ford on the Enoree River, killing sixty and taking seventy prisoners before news arrived that other patriot forces had been defeated at Camden and the whole campaign had shifted. Among the patriots at Musgrove's Mill were companies from the 2nd Spartan Regiment — Colonel Thomas Brandon's men from the Tyger and Pacolet country, the same regiment that would be at King's Mountain two months later and at Cowpens the following January. This was a neighbourhood at war, and the same men who farmed these river bottoms and traded at Grindal Shoals were the ones answering every call.
Blackstocks Farm and the Goudelock Cabin
There was Blackstocks Farm, in November 1780, where Thomas Sumter — the Gamecock, South Carolina's most tenacious partisan commander — fought Tarleton's cavalry to a standstill on the Tyger River. The upcountry militia who answered Sumter's call that day included men from across the Tyger and Pacolet river country — the same neighbourhood that had sent fighters to Musgrove's Mill and King's Mountain and would send them again to Cowpens. Sumter was hit by five buckshot, one of which lodged against his spine, and had to be carried from the field. He was brought, in the days that followed, to the Goudelock cabin in the Sandy Run community — a farmhouse within the web of families that made up the Grindal Shoals district — where he was hidden from British pursuit while he recovered. The family that sheltered him took a real risk. Tarleton's men were not gentle with those caught aiding the enemy. Sumter survived to keep fighting. The Goudelock family kept his secret.
The Civil War: The Old Men and the Young Men
Union County went to war in 1861 as it had gone to the Revolution — largely, and with the grim purposefulness of a community that did not do things halfway. There was a bitter irony in the moment of departure. The lawyer who had written John Foster's modest 1831 will and James Thomas Moseley's will of 1839 was J. S. Sims, a man of standing rooted in the Grindal Shoals district. Thirty years on, Major Joseph Stark Sims put his hand to the South Carolina Ordinance of Secession, carrying out of the republic the same community whose founding documents he had once recorded. The same ground, the same courthouse, a generation apart.
The county's young men enlisted in the Confederate regiments forming across South Carolina. Henry Foster, who had grown up on Sandy Run, went into the 5th South Carolina Infantry. John Hames and Charles Hames went into the 18th South Carolina — the regiment that carried the flag of the Pea Ridge Volunteers, still on display at the Union County Museum. Brothers and cousins who had worked the same fields came home wounded in waves, or came home whole, or did not come home. The regiments were shipped to Virginia, where the war's eastern theatre was consuming men by the thousands in a series of engagements no one in Union County had imagined when they enlisted. There were no great battles on local ground — no Shiloh or Chickamauga in the Pacolet valley — but the war arrived through the casualty lists, through the letters that came and the letters that stopped, through the particular silence of a community waiting to learn what had happened to its men.
Reconstruction
Reconstruction in Union County was, by most accounts, brutal in both directions. The county's white population, already traumatized by the war and the loss of the social order it had supported, became a center of Ku Klux Klan activity that was among the most intense in the state. In February 1871, the county was the scene of the largest Klan raid that had ever occurred in the South — an organized campaign of terror against Black residents and Republican officeholders that the federal government ultimately had to suppress by suspending habeas corpus and sending troops. The Klan's violence in Union County was not incidental; it was systematic, and it reflected the depth of the social convulsion the war and its aftermath had produced. The community that had sheltered General Sumter and produced soldiers for both revolutions found, in the ruins of defeat, some of its worst instincts given rein.
Union County Now
Union County today is a community navigating the long aftermath of industrial decline with the same stubborn persistence that has characterized it since the first Scots-Irish families came down the Wagon Road in the 1750s. The textile mills that dominated the county's economy for most of the twentieth century have largely closed, casualties of globalization and the shift in manufacturing that transformed the American South in the 1980s and 1990s. The county seat of Union is a town of perhaps eight thousand, its downtown still anchored by a handsome courthouse, its surroundings still marked by the rolling red-clay hills and scrub-pine woods and creek bottoms that the original settlers found.
What the county has, which is harder to measure than industry or income, is depth. Three hundred years of continuous settlement, a Revolutionary War fought in its backyards, a Civil War that took its sons to Virginia and did not bring them all home, a Reconstruction that showed both its courage and its cruelty, a textile era that gave it prosperity and then took it back — Union County has been through things. The Pacolet River still runs through the Grindal Shoals below the highway bridge. Sandy Run still carries its name on the county maps, flowing past ground where Welsh blacksmiths and Scots-Irish farmers built something that has lasted, imperfectly and stubbornly, for three centuries. The gravelly hillock above the ford is still there, and if you climb it, you can still see for miles.
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