Buncombe County – Of the 1,600 plus historical markers in the state, this week’s marker can be found on Riverside Drive near the bridge that bears this historical figure’s name, leading to the community that bears the name of his Yadkin County home.
Richmond Pearson was a legislator, congressman, and diplomat born at Richmond Hill, his Yadkin County family home. Pearson was the fourth of five children of Richmond Pearson, Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, and his wife, Margaret McClung Williams Pearson. Besides his father being a judge, both of his grandfathers were members of the US Senate.
He attended Horner School in Oxford and then Princeton University, where he was valedictorian of his 1872 graduating class. In 1875, he received a master of arts degree.
Returning to his home state in 1872 to study law with his father, he was admitted to the bar in 1874. Then in June of the same year, “President Ulysses S. Grant appointed Pearson U.S. consul to Verviers and Liege, Belgium. He resigned the consulate on April 22, 1877,” according to a 1994 article by Brenda Marks Eagles.
A law partnership with John D. Davis in St. Louis, Mo., opened up, “but [he] was forced to abandon the practice to go back to North Carolina when his father died in 1878,” states the article.
He was elected as a Democrat from Buncombe County to the NC House of Representatives for two terms in 1885 and 1887. While a legislator, he was entangled in two legal challenges to duels, which were widely disclosed.
In April and May 1886, Pearson challenged General Johnstone Jones and R. Y. McAden, another legislator and financier from Caswell County, in connection with Pearson’s opposition to the Buncombe County Stock Law of 1885, an issue that, according to an article by Luke Manget, helped bring the Republican Party to power in Western North Carolina. Pearson became a champion for the stock law opposition. Thus arraying himself against Jones and McAden, leading to the duel challenges. Both challenges were declined.
Pearson took advantage of the rift the Stock Law created in the Democratic Party. He switched to the Republican Party and was re-elected as a Republican to the state and then the Ninth Congressional District to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1894 and 1896.
“He lost the race in 1898 but successfully contested the honesty of the election and unseated his Democratic opponent, William T. Crawford, in a May 1900 court decision of May 1900. Pearson had been a supporter of the Republican-Populist fusion of 1894, but fusion governor Daniel Russell denounced Pearson for the tactics he employed in the Crawford controversy,” says Eagles’ article.
He was appointed US Consul to Genoa, Italy, on December 10, 1901, by President Theodore Roosevelt. “A year later, he was made envoy extraordinaire and minister plenipotentiary to Persia, and in 1907 he was appointed to the same position in Greece and Montenegro. He held the latter post for two years before retiring to his home in Asheville, also named Richmond Hill. Pearson was well served in his role as diplomat by his knowledge of the French, German, and Italian languages,” Eagles’ article stated.
“Pearson became discouraged when his friend Theodore Roosevelt failed to win the Republican nomination for president at the Chicago convention of 1912, but he supported Roosevelt in his bid for the presidency as the Progressive Party’s nominee. After Roosevelt’s defeat in the general election, Pearson no longer participated in partisan politics.
“In 1882, Pearson married Gabrielle Thomas, the daughter of James Thomas, Jr., one of the wealthiest tobacco planters in Virginia. The Pearsons had four children, two of whom lived to maturity. Richmond, Jr., died in infancy, and another son, also named Richmond, died of scarlet fever at age sixteen. A daughter, Marjorie, and a son, Thomas, outlived their parents. Pearson died at Richmond Hill after an acute illness of two weeks and was buried in Riverside Cemetery, Asheville.”