Aunts and Uncles~The Life and Legacy of Richard Eddins (1783-1845)

 

RICHARD EDDINS

abt. 1783 – 1845

A Pioneer of Chesterfield County, South Carolina, and the Alabama Frontier

Quick Facts

Born	About 1783, Chesterfield County, South Carolina
Died	Before 19 May 1845, Pike County, Alabama (per probate record); the family recalled his death as occurring in late September or early October
Parents	William Eddins (1757–1822) and Nancy (d. 1816)
Spouse	Elizabeth Wilson (1795 – after 1860), daughter of James Wilson (1769–1830) and Lydia
Married	About 1808, South Carolina
Children	Twelve (documented in detail below), plus at least one additional daughter, Eliza, named in an 1861 Chancery Court statement
Migration	Removed from Chesterfield County, SC to Alabama about 1819, first to Monroe County, then Wilcox County, and finally Pike County
Burial	Traditionally associated with Bagdad Cemetery, Bagdad, Santa Rosa County, Florida, per Find A Grave

Early Life in South Carolina

Richard Eddins was born about 1783, most likely in the Chesterfield County area of the South Carolina backcountry, the son of William Eddins (1757–1822) and his wife Nancy (d. 1816). Richard grew up in the years immediately following the American Revolution, a period when the Pee Dee region of South Carolina — including Chesterfield County — was being resettled and organized by families of English, Scots-Irish, and Welsh descent who had pushed inland from the coastal low country. This was a time of raw, developing communities: courthouses, churches, and roads were only beginning to knit the upcountry together, and families like the Eddinses farmed small holdings while the cotton economy that would soon transform the Deep South was just taking shape.

By 1810, Richard Eddins headed his own household in Chesterfield District, South Carolina. The federal census of that year recorded him as a man between the ages of 26 and 44, born in South Carolina, with a young son and daughter under the age of ten in the household, along with one enslaved person.

Marriage to Elizabeth Wilson

About 1808, Richard married Elizabeth Wilson (1795 – after 1860), the daughter of James Wilson (1769–1830) and his wife Lydia. This estimated marriage date is drawn from the birth of the couple's eldest known child, James Hosea Eddins, on 29 March 1809 in Chesterfield County. Elizabeth was considerably younger than Richard — about twelve years his junior — which was not unusual for the period. Over the following two decades, the couple would raise a large family that eventually followed the westward pull of the cotton frontier into the newly opened lands of Alabama.

The Move to Alabama, about 1819

Around 1819, Richard Eddins moved his family from Chesterfield County, South Carolina, to Monroe County in the Alabama Territory. This migration placed the family squarely within one of the great population movements of the early nineteenth century. Alabama Territory had only been organized in 1817, carved from the Mississippi Territory following the defeat of the Creek Confederacy in the Creek War of 1813–1814 and the resulting cession of millions of acres of former Creek land. Alabama achieved statehood in December 1819 — the very year the Eddins family is believed to have arrived — and the region was in the midst of a land rush that historians would later call “Alabama Fever,” as families from South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia streamed west and south in search of fresh cotton land.

The 1820 Alabama state census found Richard Eddins settled in Wilcox County, heading a household that included his wife and children. This was frontier country: new counties were still being surveyed and organized, land offices were doing brisk business, and the rich soils of the Alabama Black Belt were rapidly being converted from forest and former Creek territory into cotton plantations, worked in no small part by the labor of enslaved people, two of whom — a girl named Sophia and a boy named Elias — are named in Richard's own 1820 deed of gift to his children.

A Father's Provision: The 1820 Deed of Gift

On 29 July 1820, Richard Eddins executed a remarkable deed in Wilcox County, Alabama, conveying property to six of his children — Hosea (called “Hosey”), Harriett, Louisa Jane, William, Lydia, and Jackson — “for the consideration of the Love and Affection” he bore them. The gift included two enslaved people (Sophia and Elias), two horses, twenty head of cattle, forty hogs, a barge with a riding chair, a horse cart, and the household and kitchen furniture. The deed was witnessed by Jepthah Bell and recorded on 10 August 1820 in Deed Book A, page 3, of Wilcox County. Such deeds of gift were a common way for a father of modest but growing means to provide for his children's futures while he was still living, effectively distributing a portion of the family's working capital — livestock, tools, and enslaved laborers — among the next generation.

This document is especially valuable to Richard's descendants because it names six of his children as a group in 1820, confirming their existence and approximate birth order at a single point in time, only a year or so after the family's arrival in Alabama.

Later Years in Pike County

The Eddins family's Alabama homestead eventually settled in Pike County, formed in 1821 from portions of Henry and Montgomery Counties. An August 1830 probate record for Richard's father-in-law, James Wilson, names Richard Eddins among the deceased man's kindred, confirming the family connection between the Eddins and Wilson lines. Richard and Elizabeth appear to have remained in the Pike County area for the rest of Richard's life, raising their large family amid the ongoing settlement of the Alabama frontier through the 1820s and into the 1840s.

Death and Estate

Richard Eddins died intestate — that is, without a will — in Pike County, Alabama. Probate records establish that he was deceased before 19 May 1845, the earliest dated document in his estate file. Decades later, in October 1861, his son Richard J. Eddins gave a statement in Pike County's Chancery Court recalling that his father had “departed this life” about the last of September or the first of October, leaving his widow, Elizabeth, and a large family of heirs at law.

Because Richard left no will, his estate was administered through the probate court, and because three or four of his children were still minors at the time of his death, the court appointed guardians to look after their interests. Archibald Graves — who had married Richard's daughter Harriett — served as an early guardian for the minor children, and James M. Gibson, who had married daughter Elizabeth, later served as guardian for the minors Richard, Joseph, and Malinda. The estate file, opened under the name “Eddins, Malinda,” eventually grew to thirty-two images and includes inventories, guardianship bonds, and a Pike Circuit Court case from the Fall Term of 1845 styled Malinda Eddins et al., minors, v. Archibald Graves — a reminder that even routine guardianship matters could end up before a judge when a large family's interests had to be sorted out.

The estate proceedings also preserve a small but telling detail: at some point the guardianship case was transferred from neighboring Dale County to Pike County, suggesting some uncertainty or dispute at the time over exactly where jurisdiction over the family's affairs properly belonged — not unusual in a part of Alabama where county lines were still being redrawn.

 

Research Note — The 1861 Chancery Court Statement On 4 October 1861, Richard's son Richard J. Eddins gave a sworn statement in Pike County Chancery Court naming all of his father's heirs at law — our fullest single record of the family. Charlie is working to locate the original chancery court letter/case file, most likely held by FamilySearch or the Alabama Department of Archives and History (ADAH), Montgomery, Alabama.

 

That 1861 statement is the single richest surviving record of Richard's family, naming thirteen heirs and their spouses and residences in one document. It also preserves a detail not found elsewhere in the assembled records: a daughter named Eliza, who married first Eli Trevathan, then Jacob Lynch (with whom she removed to Texas), and finally a third husband whose surname was recorded only as “?Graham.” Both Eliza and her husbands were reported dead by 1861, and she is noted as leaving heirs of her own. Because Eliza does not appear as a separately documented entry in the structured family group sheet, she is recorded here as an additional child of Richard and Elizabeth on the strength of this 1861 testimony alone.

Historical Context: A Life on the Moving Frontier, 1783–1846

Richard Eddins's lifetime spanned one of the most transformative periods in the early American South. He was born only a few years after the end of the Revolutionary War, into a backcountry South Carolina still being organized into counties and parishes. He came of age during the presidencies of Washington through Jefferson, as cotton — newly profitable after the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 — began to reshape agriculture across the Carolinas.

His family's removal to Alabama about 1819 placed them at the leading edge of the “Alabama Fever” migration, one of the largest internal population movements in the nation's early history, as the Creek cession lands were thrown open to settlement in the years following the War of 1812 and the Creek War. Alabama's transformation from territory to state (1819) and the rapid organization of new counties such as Wilcox (1819) and Pike (1821) mirror almost exactly the family's own movements during these years. By the time of Richard's death in the mid-1840s, the frontier had matured into settled cotton country, and within a generation his grandsons — among them Joseph C. Eddins and Richard J. Eddins — would be swept into the Civil War, with Joseph dying of disease at Camp Watts, Alabama, in February 1863 while serving in the 8th Alabama Infantry, and Richard J. Eddins surviving Confederate service and a term as a prisoner of war before returning home to Pike County and, later, Santa Rosa County, Florida.

Children of Richard Eddins and Elizabeth Wilson

Richard and Elizabeth raised a large family that scattered across Alabama, Florida, and Texas over the course of the nineteenth century. The twelve children documented in the family group sheet are summarized below, along with the additional daughter, Eliza, named only in the 1861 Chancery Court statement.

#	Name	Birth	Death	Spouse(s) / Marriage
1	James Hosea Eddins	29 Mar 1809, Chesterfield Co., SC	d. aft. 1861 (Santa Rosa Co., FL area)	Rebecca Black (1812–1885); m. 15 Nov 1831, Pike Co., AL
2	Louisa Jane “Jane” Eddins	14 Sep 1814, Alabama	25 Feb 1887, Monroe Co., AL	(1) William Grimes (b. 1805); m. 7 May 1832 — (2) George W. Stacey; m. 8 Sep 1864, Monroe Co., AL
3	Harriett Edna Eddins	1815, Chesterfield Co., SC (or abt 1820, Pike Co., AL)	1886, Alabama	(1) Archibald Graves (1785–1856) — (2) Luke Flowers (1805–1897)
4	William R. Eddins	24 Mar 1816, Pike Co., AL	27 Jan 1866, Bagdad, Santa Rosa Co., FL	Eliza M. McDonald (1825–1860); m. 17 Jun 1845, Pike Co., AL
5	Lydia Eddins	abt 1818	aft. 1880, Coffee Co., AL	Phillip William Sellers (1815–1880); m. 27 Jan 1838, Pike Co., AL
6	Simeon “Jackson” Eddins	bef. Jul 1820	aft. 1870, Pike Co., AL	Mary Currin; m. 27 Feb 1845, Pike Co., AL
7	Nancy Helen Eddins	abt 1821, Wilcox Co., AL	7 Apr 1888, Colorado Co., TX	James Irvin Adams (1813–1870); m. 6 Jan 1839, Pike Co., AL
8	Elizabeth Eddins	1 Jan 1824	6 Dec 1883	James Milton Gibson (1815–1899); m. 13 Mar 1845, Pike Co., AL
9	Martha Ann Eddins	abt 1826	aft. 1880	Thomas S. Crane (b. 1827); m. 18 Dec 1847, Pike Co., AL
10	Sarah “Malinda” Eddins	abt 1830	5 Oct 1918, Covington Co., AL	Goldsbury Flowers (1826–1870); m. 7 Feb 1846, Pike Co., AL
11	Joseph C. Eddins	abt 1831, Pike Co., AL	18 Feb 1863, Camp Watts, Autauga Co., AL (Civil War)	Eliza Isabella Owen (1838–1917); m. 3 Feb 1857, Wilcox Co., AL
12	Richard John Thrashly Eddins	abt 1833, Pike Co., AL	2 Jan 1900, Santa Rosa Co., FL	(1) Catherine Frances Wheeler (1841–1882); m. abt 1861/62 — (2) Emma Sullivan (1869–1938); m. 15 Jan 1885, Crenshaw Co., AL

 

Several patterns are worth noting among the children. Most of the daughters and sons remained clustered in Pike County and neighboring Coffee County, Alabama, for much of their lives, marrying into local families such as the Sellers, Graves, Gibson, Crane, Flowers, and Adams families. Two sons, William R. Eddins and Richard J. Eddins, eventually relocated to the Bagdad and Milton area of Santa Rosa County, Florida, where William died in 1866 and where Richard J. Eddins died in 1900 — both are associated with Bagdad Cemetery there, the same burial ground traditionally linked to Richard Eddins himself. Daughter Nancy Helen Eddins Adams and, by family report, daughter Eliza both eventually made their way to Texas, illustrating how widely a single Chesterfield County family could scatter within two generations of leaving South Carolina.

NOTE:  Eliza Eddins IS NOT a daughter of Richard Eddies and his wife Elizabeth Wilson. Eliza Eddins is their Neice. Her parents are Richard's brother Wlilliam Eddins and his wife, Elizabeth Ingram.

Richard Eddins is my 3rd Great GrandUncle. 

The “Aunts & Uncles” series of biographical sketches are Artificial Intelligence (AI) compiled narratives of selected individuals from my Genealogical database.  The selected AI will used the RootsMagic Individual Summary from my Genealogical Software, Roots Magic. All genealogical data is my research material acquired over the past 46 years of research. Today's Biography of Richard Eddins (1783-1845) was compiled with the assistance of Claude Sonnett  5 Medium. 

Sources

This biography draws on a Family Group Sheet compiled 9 July 2026 (citing U.S. federal and Alabama state census records for 1810, 1820, 1840, 1850, 1860, and 1870; Wilcox County, Alabama Deed Book A; Pike County, Alabama Deed Book K; Pike County probate and guardianship records; Find A Grave memorials; and family correspondence among Eddins researchers), together with a summary listing of the Richard Eddins probate/estate folder (“Alabama Estate Files, 1830–1976,” FamilySearch, Pike County > Eddins, Malinda (1847), images 1–32).

 

Prepared by

Charles Purvis