To escape religious persecution after the Edict of Nantes, Pierre fled France with his parents and brother Daniel, arriving in Charles Town, South Carolina in 1685.

[3] This period of time was known as Le Refuge, after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, during which French Protestants were forbidden by Louis XIV to leave the country and were ordered to convert to Catholicism under penalty of death.

[5] After his father's death, Pierre Bacot (1671-1730) and brother Daniel moved to Goose Creek, about 20 miles upriver from Charles Town on the Cooper River.

[7] The Goose Creek men became leaders of the early Indian trade, and by the 1690s many held important offices in the colonial government.

Gideon Johnston (1668–1716), Bishop of London’s Commissary in South Carolina, said of Charles Town in a letter to the Bishop of Salisbury in 1708, “I never repented so much of anything...as my coming to this Place”; “the People here...are the Vilest race of Men upon the Earth”; while in a 1709 report to the English church authorities, “were it not for the assistance my wife gives me by drawing of pictures (which can last but a little time in a place so ill peopled) I should not be able to live.”[13]