Price, Richard

From: An Island Refuge- Loyalists and Disbanded Troops on The Island of Saint John, The Abegweit Branch of UELAC, 1983

  • A century-old chronicle states that RICHARD PRICE, founder of his family in North America, was born at Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, England, in “1760” (i.e., about 1761). On July 26, 1784, he arrived at Charlottetown, the Island of Saint John, from Shelburne, Nova Scotia, a refugee settlement, landing along with American Loyalists of like mind. Still a bachelor, Price as one of two disbanded redcoat-veterans of the Seventh Regiment of Foot. That unit had been personally organized by King James II in 1685 as “Our Royal Regiment of Fusiliers”, formed by augmenting two independent companies quartered from ancient times in the Tower of London. Richard had entered the 7th Fusiliers as a private soldier on December 23, 1780. Less than a month later he was captured, with nearly all his surviving comrades, at the famous and crucial Battle of the Cowpens which was fought in South Carolina on January 17, 1781.
  • Cowpens, a classic episode of tactical upset, was recently re-enacted on-site at its Bicentennial, complete with British redcoats and musket smoke. Of special interest concerning Fusiliers Richard Price is that after the battle: “the prisoners made things difficult…they thought Cornwallis was on his way to their rescue and dragged their feet pleading lameness and illness to impede the march. The guards used bayonets and, according to a witness, ‘drove the prisoners along like brute beasts.'” (1 Burke Davis, The Cowpens-Guilford Courthouse Campaign. Philadelphia, Pa.: J.B. Lippin- cott, 1962, p. 45.) After Price’s release (quite possibly by prisoner exchange about November, 1782) to Charleston, South Carolina, and the British evacuation there on December 14, 1782, he was discharged at New York on October 25, 1783, exactly a month before the last royal stronghold was in turn evacuated to Halifax, Nova Scotia.
  • Granted land in Bedeque on or before his arrival at the Island, Richard Price received warrant of this on April 1, 1786, when Governor Patterson gave him the deed to a split parcel of fifty acres fronting on Bede- que Bay plus fifty acres inland near Freetown. These were conferred in “Lot or Township Number Twenty-five” and “in consideration of the … great Zeal and good will which he the said Walter Patterson beareth to the said Richard Price ‘Farmer’ for and on account of his Loyalty and attach- ment to his present Majesty”. The former Royal Fusilier was thereby rewarded for his “Loyalty services and distress” during the American Revolution.