Bicentennial Profile: “Old Thunder Gusty” Robert Anderson
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
As Anderson County celebrates its bicentennial, The Anderson Observer is looking back and some of the people who made significant contributions to the county’s history. Today we look at the namesake of the county, Robert Anderson.
Robert Anderson was the kind of frontier figure who appears, in retrospect, to have been made for county names: soldier, surveyor, landholder, legislator, church elder, and the sort of man around whom local history gathers like weather. In Anderson County, where the city and the county both bear his name, he is remembered not so much as a polished statesman than as a Revolutionary back-country patriarch whose life ran alongside the making of the upcountry itself.
Born in 1741 near Staunton, Virginia, to Scotch-Irish parents, Anderson came south into the contested country beyond the Long Cane Creek line, where settlement pressed against Cherokee territory. There he met Andrew Pickens, his lifelong friend and neighbor, and the two men became, in effect, one another’s political and military shadow. Both would later be branded traitors during the Revolution, though that word, in the backcountry, had the instability of a stone thrown into a crowd.
Anderson trained himself as a surveyor and saw opportunity in the Carolina frontier. He married Anne Thompson after a two-year absence in Virginia, and legend, with its usual disregard for chronology, says they left on the same day for the Long Canes. They had one son and four daughters, a family line that would spread through the county but, as later observers noted, often under other surnames.
When the Revolution broke out, Pickens commanded and Anderson served as a captain in a partisan militia regiment that fought repeatedly around Ninety Six and Augusta. Their reputation hardened after Charleston fell in May 1780. Like many others, they accepted British offers of parole and neutrality, only to conclude that the promises had been made to be broken. Louise Ayer Vandiver in her book, “Traditions and History of Anderson County,” wrote that had the British kept their word, history might never have heard from Robert Anderson again.
Once they returned to the fight, they did so under the threat of hanging if captured. Anderson’s militia command played a key role at Cowpens, where Daniel Morgan’s victory over the British on Jan. 17, 1781, is widely treated as a turning point in the war. Afterward Pickens was promoted to brigadier general and Anderson to colonel; later, after the final Cherokee campaign, Anderson received the title of general in the state militia as well.
The Cherokee, for their part, reportedly knew him as “Old Thunder Gusty,” a name that suggests both temperament and force of character. In the hard language of frontier warfare, Anderson and Pickens were instruments of a larger and bloodier remaking of the region.
With the fighting over, Anderson moved onto the land that the war had opened. He and Pickens became founding commissioners of Pendleton and, as elders, helped establish Hopewell Presbyterian Church. Anderson later served in the House from Pendleton District and as lieutenant governor from 1796 to 1798. His Presbyterianism, opponents claimed, made him partial against Baptists and other denominations, a mark of religion and politics on the frontier.
At his death in 1813, Anderson owned 2,100 acres, including a tract stretching from Deep Creek to Andersonville, the trading center he helped establish at the headwaters of the Savannah River. The land itself is almost a map of the county’s early ambitions: commerce, settlement, and the steady conversion of contested ground into named place.
Anderson died at home near Pendleton at 72, having outlived three wives and, if gossip can be trusted, having been in the market for a fourth. He had asked to be buried in the Old Stone Church cemetery beside Pickens, but a winter freshet made the Seneca River impassable, and the burial party turned back. He was laid instead in a remote corner of his plantation, where his grave was neglected for years.
The afterlife of his memory was more orderly than his burial. In 1933, the Cateechee Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution placed a marker at the grave. In 1960, when Hartwell Lake threatened to cover the site, Anderson’s remains were moved to the Old Stone Church cemetery at last, where he joined his old friend in the ground he had helped make safe for settlement. The county held a ceremony to celebrate
Anderson’s story did not end with the better-known names of county history. His younger brother, Maj. James Anderson, also came south after serving in Virginia and settled near Slabtown on the road from Pendleton to Greenville, with land in the Hopewell section as well. His descendants—including Julius Anderson and H.G. Anderson Sr.—went on to play prominent roles in business and civic life in the county.
That is the peculiarity of Robert Anderson’s legacy. He is remembered in the names of city and county, in the church cemetery, in the war stories, in the old trading paths and plantation acres. But his memory also survives recalling the sort of man frontier counties like to imagine themselves sprung from: practical, stubborn, locally formidable, and impossible to separate from the land he helped claim.
