Pleasant Richardson
Open-knowledge reference entry
Pleasant Richardson (c. 1845- May 30, 1935) was a resident of Fincastle in Botetourt County, Virginia, where he was a former slave, a property owner, and Civil War veteran.
Early life
Pleasant Richardson was born to his slave parents, Patrick and Martha Richardson, on the nearby Edward Johnson family plantation, Lauderdale, in about 1845. His name is not listed on the 1850 census of Botetourt County. However, an inventory of the plantation was taken in 1853 when Edward Johnson died, and listed the 50 slaves present on the farm. Pleasant was the third youngest in the family. The siblings included Will, Louis, Maria, Adaline, Taylor and Joe.
Civil War
During the third year of the Civil War, he fled the plantation and crossed the border to Grafton, West Virginia, in 1864. There at age 19, he enlisted in Company F of the 45th United States Colored Infantry Regiment. This was the single black regiment assigned to West Virginia, and was composed mostly of escaped slaves and some freedmen from Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pleasant Richardson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.