Pegues Place
South Carolina
Near here, in the Marlboro County countryside, stands Pegues Place, a two story Georgian frame house built around seventeen seventy. It was the home of Captain Claudius Pegues, a planter and a patriot said to have ridden with Francis Marion, the famous Swamp Fox. The house witnessed a remarkable moment of mercy in a brutal war.
On May third, seventeen eighty one, in the midst of the Revolution's vicious Southern campaign, a cartel for the exchange of prisoners of war was signed right here, an agreement between the American and British forces to trade captives and ease the suffering of men held in wretched conditions. It is a reminder that even amid the cruelty of a civil war among neighbors, the combatants sometimes found common ground. The old Pegues house still stands, a quiet survivor of more than two and a half centuries.
