The city of Greenville is situated on land that was once Cherokee hunting ground. Around 1770, Richard Pearis, an Indian trader from Virginia who was living with a chief’s daughter, received about 100,000 acres of hunting lands from the Cherokees.
Pearis set up a plantation on the banks of the Reedy River in what is now downtown Greenville.
His Great Plains Plantation included a saw mill, grist mill, and stables together with a trading post. When the Revolutionary War came, the struggle in the South Carolina back country between Tories and Patriots was fierce. Pearis threw his support to the Tories and their Cherokee allies, and together they terrorized upstate Patriots. In retaliation, a Patriot troop raided his plantation, burned his mill and home, and briefly jailed him in Charleston. He never returned to the upstate, but he left his name on Paris Mountain…