Richardsons in America and Elsewhere
Richardsons emigrated as the world opened up, first to America and then to Canada and Australia principally. This page covers their progress in these new lands..
America
Many of the early English emigrants to America were Puritans,
seeking a
religious and political escape from the tensions of the time. Included
in that number were three brothers, Ezekiel, Samuel, and Thomas
Richardson, from Hertfordshire. They joined Winthrop's fleet on
the Arbella for
New England. The eldest, Ezekiel Richardson, arrived in
1636, settling in Charlestown, and his two brothers followed six years
later. Their descendants can be traced to this day and include,
via Thomas, Bill
Richardson, the present Governor of New Mexico.
The Quaker Influx. A
larger number of Richardsons probably came to America in the early days
as Quakers. When William Penn founded Pennsylvania in 1681, it
became a refuge for Quakers. And it is remarkable how many of
these Quaker Richardsons had personal ties with William Penn.
Quaker Richardsons in Pennsylvania
Origin
Arrival
William.
England
1655
Francis (via New York)
Newcastle
1681
John
Co.
Armagh
1684
Samuel
London
1687
John
Yorkshire
1700
William Richardson had arrived on the Constant Friendship from England in
1655. He was a close friend of William Penn, as evidenced by the
marker that can be found near his home in Arundel County, Maryland.
Francis Richardson was granted one of the first tracts of land in
Pennsylvania by William Penn. His widow married Edward Shippen, a
wealthy Quaker who later became mayor of Philadelphia. And his
son Francis, with his shop on Front Street, became a celebrated
silversmith in the town. This craft was handed down through two
generations.
Samuel Richardson was appointed by Penn as the first alderman
of
Philadelphia. He played his part tin the building of the town,
from which he gained much wealth.
The last-named John didn't stay. He was an itinerant preacher,
publishing an autobiography at the end of a long and active life.
“More than
half of his book is devoted to
his trip to America from 1700 to 1703, during the course of which he
stayed
with William Penn, was present at a council with Indians, disputed with
George
Keith, met Thomas Story on Long Island, and preached in Maryland before
the
governor and his wife, Lord and Lady Baltimore."
He
travelled the Eastern Seaboard and was evidently a charismatic
preacher, as the Nantucketers in New England
would attest.
In
1701, William Penn helped establish a Quaker community in Chester
County, Pennsylvania. Naturally Richardson was one of its
founding families. A little later on, Joseph Richardson set up a
trading post
outside Philadelphia in Langhorne, Bucks County. Quaker
neighbors thought that the house that he built, in 1738, was too
grand. But it stayed with his family for almost two hundred years
and still stands today. Samuel Richardson, who was born there,
lived onto 1951.
Other Arrivals. America
provided economic opportunity, as well as religious freedom. This
brought other Richardson immigrants, many from Scotland.
Robert Richardson had arrived from Scotland in 1666. He
started a 2,000 acre plantation at Mount Ephraim in Maryland.
Much of this land stayed with his descendants until the late nineteenth
century.
William Richardson, from Quaker roots, owned a large
plantation at Gilpin
Point in the late 1700's. In the days
before the
Revolution,
he had a part interest in a sloop, The
Omega, which carried cargoes of corn to the West Indies.
On return trips quantities of coral stone were brought as
ballast. From
these stones his slaves built a wall surrounding his Gilpin
Point home.
There
were a number of Richardsons in Virginia as well by the first half of
the eighteenth century. Some stayed. Robert Richardson, a
recent Nobel prize winner, is a descendant of one of these
families. Other moved on, such as Isham Richardson to
Kentucky, Jonathan Richardson to
Tennessee, Richard Richardson to South Carolina, and Daniel Richardson
to Georgia. Dr. William Richardson was an early
schoolmaster in Maysville, Kentucky. His academy, built in 1829,
stood until recently. The descendants of Shadrach and Betsy
Richardson from Virginia were pioneers in Oregon and Utah.
African Americans. African Americans
bearing the name Richardson, many of them "free mulattos," can be found
in Virginia and North Carolina from the mid eighteenth century.
"Postilion
Joe," who took the name Richardson, was George Washington's
driver in
Philadelphia. He and his family were among the 124
enlaved African Americans owned by Washington who were freed after his
death. They
were fortunate. So too was James Richardson who came to Texas
from Philadelphia in 1832 and made a living by serving oysters and
refreshments to the travellers between Velasco and San Luis.
But
slavery would hold onto other African Americans for many years to
come. Charlie Richardson, an ex-slave from Warrensburg Missouri,
had some very blunt comments about the institution:
"We called
it 'putting them on the stump.' But the 'stump' was neither a
block or a stump, it was a big wooden box. We always knew when
they were going to sell because they would let them lay around and do
nothing. Fattening them up for market."
Some
ran away. Susan Richardson was
lucky. She was a runaway
slave from southern Illinois who secured her freedom in 1843.
"Aunt Sukey," as she was known, became involved in the Galesburg
underground railroad for other
runaways. Her story is narrated in the book Escape Betwixt Two Suns.
Yet
the most remarkable nineteenth century African American must be William
H. Richardson. The son of a slave from Baltimore, he patented
and developed the first baby carriage in America. How generations
of mothers should be thankful to him!
Heading South, We
find a sizeable Richardson
presence in North and South Carolina during the eighteenth and
nineteenth
centuries, and in Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.
Richardsons can be traced to Stokes, Randolph, and Moore
Counties in North Carolina from the 1750's onward. James
Richardson had come to Bladen County from New England
in the 1770's He built his plantation home, Harmony Hall, on the
banks
of the Cape Fear river. This house still stands. The
British General
Cornwallis had occupied the house during the War of Independence.
Local legend has it that James's wife, Elizabeth, was instrumental in
Cornwallis's defeat at Yorkville by secretly passing on his war plans
to the American forces.
Later, John G. Richardson
from this area headed south to the Gulf Coast where he purchased
the Bayside sugar plantation in New Iberia, Louisiana in 1829. He
was by
some accounts a humane slaveowner. One slave (Leah) stayed with
his family for over eighty years until her death in 1877.
Richard
Richardson had arrived in South Carolina from Virginia in
colonial times.
He owned a plantation in Clarendon County where he entertained local
society. One member of the Richardson family, who played by ear,
came up with a melody which became a favorite. This waltz, known
as "the Richardson waltz," was handed down from generation to
generation by ear until 1985 when an arrangement was created by Mary
Richardson Briggs. These Richardsons had an
eventful Revolutionary War. In the nineteenth century, two
Richardsons from this family, father and son, became Governors of South
Carolina pre
and post bellum.
Another
Richardson family owned a plantation in Hampton County,
Georgia at the time of the Civil War. Hattie Richardson was a
child
at that time. When interviewed some eighty years later, she
could recall the day her brothers left to join the Confederate Army and
the day Sherman's army arrived and plundered their house from attic to
cellar.
And To Texas. The state
of Texas had, by the end of the nineteenth century, the
largest number of Richardsons in the United States.
Many plantation owners had fled there, escaping Unionist
retribution in the South. These included Charles Bruce Richardson
and his family who got out of Vicksburg, Louisiana in 1863 (burning his
crops before he left) and Captain Edmund Richardson and his family who
departed Bladen County, North Carolina in the winter of 1865.
A number of these Richardsons settled in East Texas, in and around
Henderson County. Madison Richardson and his family had arrived
by wagon train from South Carolina in the late 1850's. Charles
Bruce Richardson bought a farm there and became in later life a noted
horticulturist. Farming was to be the principal occupation of the
area until the 1930's when the East Texas oilfields started
gushing. Oil made Sid Richardson from
these parts his fortune.
An earlier
arrival in Texas, in 1837, had been Willard Richardson. He
espoused
the Southern cause and later guided his local newspaper, the Galveston News, to a position of
prominence in Texas during and after the Civil War. He was a town
booster as well, building an opera house next to his newspaper
offices. After his death, the Richardson name continued in the
town. Eight Richardsons perished in the great storm of
1900. Willard's grandson was a long-time professor of obstetrics
at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. And
numerous Richardsons are on the faculty today.
The town of Richardson in Texas was named, according to the practice
of the time, after the railroad
contractor E.H. Richardson who built the line from Dallas to Denison.
Canada
The
earliest Richardson settlers
in Canada were Scots active in the fur trade.
Their sympathies were British rather than American during the
War of
Independence and they moved to Canada.
John Richardson, from these Scots fur trading roots, became one
of the early civic leaders in Montreal. After the War of 1812,
another John Richardson
began a fiction-writing
career with novels about the British and French societies in Canada at
that
time. A Scots/Canadian connection has continued since that
time.
However,
perhaps the
best-known Richardson name in Canada is that of James Richardson &
Sons,
whose large offices dominate the Winnipeg skyline.
This grain business was started in Ontario by the company
founder, James Richardson, in 1857.
His son was an aviation pioneer whose company was later
incorporated
into Air Canada.
Winnipeg international airport is named after him.
Three other
twentieth century Richardsons are commemmorated in Canada. One is
Jessie Richardson the actress, after whom the Canadian theater awards
are named. The second is Evelyn Richardson, whose best-seller We Kept a Light described their
family's isolated life as lighthouse keepers off Nova Scotia. Her
name graces a literary award. The thrd is Jack Richardson, the
record producer, now honored by the Jack Richardson music awards.
Australia
The
first
Richardsons in
Australia, it must be said, were convicts. There
were
five Richardson convicts, all sentenced in London, on the initial
convict
convoy to Australia in 1787. Others
followed and their lives went mainly unrecorded.
But John
Richardson, sentenced
tor life in 1822, is remembered as one of the pioneer horticulturists
in
Australia. His background as a gardener
gave him
exposure to those who wanted to explore the fauna of this new and
intriguing
continent. As a result, he accompanied
a number of botanical expeditions in the 1820’s and 1830’s and was able
to
secure his conditional release as a prisoner in 1837.
He lived on for another forty five years.
Free Settlers. Many more
Richardsons
came as free settlers in
Australia’s period of “long boom” in the second half of the nineteenth
century. One successful immigrant
was Robert
Richardson who had arrived from Liverpool in 1850.
He built up a business in Sydney based on wool and real
estate. His obituarist
described him as follows:
“As well as
having a keen eye for wool and real estate, Richardson was a natural
salesman. He was also a strict
Presbyterian who set great store on the strength and loyalty of his
family. Within the firm he was punctilious
and
demanding, but fair in his treatment of both customers and employees.”
Walter
Richardson had arrived from Dublin during the Victorian goldrush in the
late 1850's. He was successful for a time but then
developed a long degenarative illness which saw him committed to a
lunatic asylum. He might not have been remembered had he not had
a daughter Edith who, writing under the pen-name Henry Handel
Richardson, characterized him in one of her novels. Another
of her novels, The Fortunes,
is an archetypal story of the country, written about the great upsurge
of nineteenth century capitalism that was fuelled by the gold
discoveries.
An interesting memento of
these times is the brooch worn by Fanny
Richardson, the daughter of a Scots physician in Australia,
that
was
re-discovered a hundred years later.