Part V: Establishing the South Carolina Roots and Dispelling Mythology

While John II established a massive agricultural foothold in North Carolina, it was the subsequent generation—specifically his grandsons through lines that pushed even further south—that ultimately populated the Marion District (modern Florence County) of South Carolina.⁴

For many decades, deeply entrenched oral traditions within the Pee Dee region maintained that the original South Carolina patriarchs were two brothers named "John and Andrew" who had traveled directly from England, or perhaps directly from the port of Philadelphia, to settle the swamps.³ This localized myth simplified the family's complex, multi-generational migration.

The rigorous archival work of genealogist Erma Poston Landers, alongside modern historical conservationists, has definitively corrected this narrative. Utilizing primary source documents, census data, and Revolutionary War claim indents, historians reconstructed the true lineage.²⁰ The most definitive piece of evidence was an 1838 family Bible belonging to Hugh Poston (a descendant), which confirmed that the two foundational brothers in the South Carolina

backcountry were actually John III and Anthony III (the latter often phonetically recorded in ledgers as "Antney").³

These brothers were not the original immigrants, but the grandsons of John I.³ Anthony Poston (born c. 1760 in Chester County, PA) appears clearly in the South Carolina census records of 1800 and 1810, effectively confirming the permanent anchoring of the family line in the Great Pee Dee region.²³ John III is documented as serving as a private in Colonel Hugh Giles' Regiment of Militia, and later in Colonel John Ervin's Regiment during the Revolutionary War, serving under the command of General Francis Marion's Brigade.²⁶ The transition from the mid-Atlantic to the southern frontier forced a rapid adaptation by John III and Anthony III to the deep river bottom environment, where the family transitioned from the wheat and mixed-grain farming of Pennsylvania to the cultivation of highly profitable cash crops suited to the humid, flood-prone Carolinas.

Poston Generation Key Figure(s) Geographic Historical

Location Contribution

First John I & Martha Shropshire, England Immigrated from

Poston to Chester Co., PA Liverpool in 1703;

secured the original

274.5-acre land

patent on Octoraro

Creek.⁴

Second John II & Margaret Chester Co., PA to Sold the PA estate

(Baldridge) Poston Rowan Co., NC in 1766 for £730;

navigated the Great

Philadelphia Wagon

Road; became a

major landholder on

the Catawba

River.²⁶

Third John III & Anthony Rowan Co., NC to Dispelled the "John

III ("Antney") Poston Marion District, SC and Andrew" oral

myth; served in the

Revolutionary War;

established the

permanent family

foothold in the Pee

Dee river

backcountry.⁴