In 1792 Benjamin Franklin Perry Sr. sold 300 acres of land (part of his 1786 land grant) to Jonas Hill. This land was located on Wolf Creek of 12-Mile Creek/River in Pendleton County, South Carolina, witnessed by Nathaniel Perry. The following is a brief sketch of Benjamin and his brother Nathaniel.
Benjamin Franklin Perry Sr., born 1761 in Sherborn, Mass. and died in 1842 in Pickens Co. (now Oconee) SC, m/Ann Foster, b/1777 Union Co., SC and d/1848 Pickens Co. (now Oconee), South Carolina. Both are buried in Terrill-Perry Family Cemetery in Oconee Co. South Carolina. Nathaniel Perry was born in 1754 and married first to Suannah Hooper in SC and second 1785 SC to Elizabeth Mason. He diec 27 Nov 1808 and is buried in the Perry Family Cemetery in Oconee Co., SC.
Their parents were Moses Perry 1719-1809 and Deborah Ivery (d/1766). Moses’ grandfather, John Perry, joined a little band of Puritans that left England with John Eliot to seek refuge for their faith in a new land. He became a freeholder in Roxbury, Mass. on March 4, 1633 and lived in the colony until he died nine years later. His oldest son, John Jr. b/1667, moved from Roxbury to Medfield, Mass. in 1672 and then to Sherborn, a village about twenty miles from Boston.
Nathaniel lived in Salem, Mass., where he was engaged in an extensive mercantile business that carried him to England and the Continent. He served for several years during the American Revolution, being with Washington at Valley Forge. After the Revolution, Nathaniel (after business failures) went to Charleston, SC, where he worked for the mercantile firm of Wadsworth and Turpin.
Benjamin, who had meanwhile been employed as a clerk in a Boston store owned by a Mr. Gray, joined Nathaniel in Charleston in 1784. Wadsworth and Turpin then suggested that the two brothers take an assortment of goods into the back country and start a store there, in what was known as the hills of the Piedmont. When the Perry brothers entered the Piedmont in 1784 or 1785, it was still a heavily wooded area , excellent for raising stock and cultivating grain. They chose what they considered a good location for their store, Ruff’s in Newberry County, a populous settlement just above the "Dutch Fork."
Evidently this enterprise did not prove successful, for the next year they moved to that part of old Ninety Six District which soon became Greenville County, and planted their store about six miles above the present city of Greenville. Since land grants to Nathaniel on Moore’s Fork of Enoree River in July and August, 1785 show the purchase of 638 acres, the brothers evidently engaged in farming as well as selling merchandise.
A year later the store was moved to a point that evidently proved more profitable, for here it seems to have remained until 1791. This time the brothers chose a spot directly on the main thoroughfare between the up country and the low, the old Cherokee path, now widened into a wagon road that ran from Keowee (formerly the Lower Towns of the Cherokees) along the Saluda, Congaree, and the Santee rivers to Charlston. It was on Twelve Mile River not far from Keowee in old Ninety Six District (in the part that is now Pickens County) that they bought their land.
Benjamin purchased 640 acres on Wolf Creek of Twelve Mile River on June 5, 1786. Nathaniel three months later bought 776 acres on Ravens and Buck creeks on the same river. The following summer Benjamin added 539 acres to his former purchase.
New land grants in 1791 indicate that the Perry brothers moved from their location on Twelve Mile River to lands on the creeks of Tugaloo River, a branch of the Savannah, on the extreme north-western boundary of the state. On Dec. 5, 1791 Benjamin purchased 280 acres on Choestow Creek, adjoining a farm of 160 acres which Nathaniel had purchased a few months before. It was on this land that Benjamin built his permanent home, adding 500 acres a short distance away on Coneross Creek of Keowee River in 1798. Nathaniel remained in the same locality, purchasing 471 additional acres in 1793, and a valuable estate of 210 acres eight or ten miles distant on Chauga Creek in 1798, on which he built a very fine county home. At the same time he purchased extensive lands on other streams nearby. The joint purchase by Nathaniel and Benjamin of 364 acres on Shoal Creek, a branch of Choestow Creek, in 1794 indicated that they placed their store very near Benjamin’s home.
The property of the two brothers was situated in what was then Pendleton County of Washington Dist., a new district carved from old Ninety Six District in 1791. Pendleton County in 1798 became Pendleton District, comprising the present counties of Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens.
Benjamin Perry built his home on the land he had purchased on Choestow Creek just above its juncture with Tugaloo River in 1791. It was in a remote and picturesque section of what is now Oconee County, twenty-three miles from old Pendleton Court House. In 1798, when he was 38, Benjamin Perry married Anna Foster, daughter of John Crow Foster (1765-1808) and Sarah Kirksey. John Crow Foster’s parents were John Foster (b/c1739 Amelia Co., VA and d/1838 Pinckneyville, Union Dist, SC) and Eleanor Collins b/1749, d/1844 Greenville Dist. SC. The Foster family is also well documented. To Benjamin and Anna were born four children: Nathaniel James Foster, b/1798, Harriet Desdemona b/1801, Benjamin F. Jr. b/1805, and Josiah Foster b/1812. For a more detailed account of this Perry family, read Benjamin F. Perry, South Carolina Unionist, by Lillian Adele Kibler, Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 1946, about the life of Benjamin F. Perry Jr. b/1805 who became Governor of South Carolina after the Civil War during the Reconstruction days.