Cheraw, South Carolina
Cheraw ( , ) is a town on the Pee Dee River in Chesterfield County, South Carolina, United States. The population was 5,040 at the 2020 census. The greater Cheraw area in the zip code 29520 has a population of 13,689 according to the 2019 ACS data. It has been nicknamed "The Prettiest Town in Dixie". History Origins When the first Europeans arrived in the area it was inhabited by the Cheraw and Pee Dee American Indian tribes. The Cheraw lived near the waterfall hill, near present-day Cheraw, but by the 1730s they had been devastated by new infectious disease inadvertently carried by the European traders. Survivors joined the Catawba Confederacy for safety and left their name in history. Only a few scattered Cheraw families remained by the time of the American Revolution. A few European settlers entered their territory in the 1730s, and were then forced upriver when the Welsh came to claim the Welsh Baptist lands granted by the English government in the area around Society Hill. Many of the early settlers of the 1740s in Cheraw were ethnic English, Scots, French Huguenots, or Scots-Irish. By 1750, Cheraw had become an established Anglo-American village with a growing river trade, one of the first inland villages. It was one of only six places in South Carolina that appeared on English maps at the time. In the 1760s, Joseph and Eli Kershaw were granted the part of Cheraw that is now the downtown historic district. The Kershaws laid out a formal street system. By 1830 settlers lined all the streets with rows of elms. The Kershaws originally called the town "Chatham", but people never accepted this name, continuing to call it "Cheraw" or "Cheraw Hill". American Revolution There was a lack of organization and rule during the beginning of the 1740s in the backcountry of South Carolina. This lack of organization and unrest was an underlying cause of the resentment people of these areas felt toward the British Crown. In the Pee Dee area, planters organized a group called the Regulators to help bring order to the area. In 1768 St. David's Parish, the last Anglican Church built in South Carolina under King George III, was established to help serve the civic and religious needs of the Cheraw area. Later a judicial district and courthouse were established to help deal with the problem of order. However, there was still much discontent with the ruling authority, and in May 1776 the grand jury of the Cheraws District Two declared its independence from Great Britain. Many area men played prominent roles in the American Revolution. They included Claudius Pegues, General Henry W. Harrington, the Ellerbe brothers, Philip Pledger, and Eli Kershaw. There was much unrest in the area during this time because Cheraw fell into part of the British strategic line of defense, where garrisons were built to control revolutionaries and to encourage loyalists. Other towns in this line of defense included Camden, South Carolina, and Augusta, Georgia. Cheraw also became a