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Who were these pioneer Hardys that took up and tilled the war torn land? Both their deed to the original tract as well as family tradition tell us that they came from Lunenburg County in southern Virginia...
...the eldest daughter of the family, Elizabeth, had married her cousin Samuel Hardy in 1782 and moved to Union district just across the Tyger from where they bought their land...
...The original settlers in Newberry County were Thomas Hardy, Sr. and his wife, Phoebe Jeter. In 1932 their ninety-one-year-old great-grandson, William Dixon Hardy, could sit on the porch of the Hardy home and say that these first settlers came with eight children, "the youngest on a sidesaddle with her mother," riding on horseback from Lunenburg County, where they built a log cabin on a beautiful knoll several hundred yards from the "Old Columbia Road," near its intersection with the main highway between Pennsylvania and Georgia--that is, the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road of the eighteenth century...
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The first ancestor of the Hardy family of Tyger River to be born in Virginia was Richard Jr., son of Richard and Mary Vincent Hardy, who was born in 1699 in Isle of Wight, and thence removed to Lunenburg. He married Mary Covington of Amelia County, Virginia, and they had nine children. the eldest was Thomas Hardy Sr. (1732-1814), the progenitor of this branch of the family on Tyger River in South Carolina. At the age of forty-four, Thomas served in the Revolution with General Washington. His wife, Phoebe Jeter, was also born in Lunenburg and was nine years his junior. Many of her Anglo-Norman Jeter family likewise migrated to nearby Union District, South Carolina, where her patronymic continues to be prominent. In 1768 Thomas and Phoebe lived in Nottoway Parish, Amelia County. When they sold 200 acres in Nottoway in that year, Thomas signed, but Phoebe "made her mark." Their first child had been born in 1762 and by 1782 they had nine more. Of their first ten offspring, eight survived to come to Carolina, seven with their parents, as the great-grandson recalled a century and a half later. As we have seen, another, their eldest, Elizabeth, was already living on the Tyger with her new husband, Sam Hardy, the son of Thomas's brother William, when the rest of her family made the move...
*Source: Our Fathers' Fields, James Everett Kibler, University South Carolina Press [1998],
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