Pleasant Richardson (c. 1845- May 30, 1935) was a resident of Fincastle in Botetourt County, Virginia, where he was a former slave, a property owner, and Civil War veteran.
[2] During the third year of the Civil War, he fled the plantation and crossed the border to Grafton, West Virginia, in 1864.
Colored Troops, a posting that took him to West Virginia and Pennsylvania, then Washington, D.C., and in the spring of 1864, he was one of 30,000 Union soldiers who undertook the ill-fated Red River Campaign across Louisiana.
Roughly one in five men on the Union side died during that expedition, but Richardson survived and the following year he was present when Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House, according to a 1935 article in the Fincastle Herald.
He acquired Lot #151 on Murray Street by his marriage to Nancy Callender Richardson, which he subsequently sold to Mary L. Dodd in 1924.
[8] Private Pleasant Richardson was posthumously awarded the West Virginia Civil War Medal for his service with the 45th US Colored Infantry.