Samuel F. Rhodes

Samuel F. Rhodes, author of I Saw You Sitting On The Moon, was born in 1949 in Mayesville, South Carolina. He is the son of Samuel McBride Rhodes and Harriet Tisdale Rhodes, and the great, great, great, great grandson of General Thomas Sumter, the South Carolina Revolutionary War hero for whom the city of Sumter was named, and for whom Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina was named. The Sumter lineage comes from his mother, Harriet.

An interesting sidenote in Samuel's ancestry is that General Sumter actually spent the night in the house in which Samuel grew up almost 180 years earlier. The Rhodes house was built in 1770 by Samuel Bradley whose granddaughter later married William David Rhodes. On a trip back up to the High Hills (Stateburg) during the 1770s General Sumter spent the night in the Bradley home (see [The Gamecock] by Robert Bass).

Samuel is a 1973 graduate of the University of South Carolina. He returned to the old Rhodes homeplace after college, and became the sixth generation of Rhodeses to farm cotton on that land. He ran the cotton farming operation with his dad until 1993, when he moved to Greenville, South Carolina.

Samuel is the owner of Print Management & Associates, Inc., a print brokerage firm, and Cotton & Cigars Publishing, a small publishing company which caters primarily to first time authors. He is a member of the Downtown Sertoma Club of Greenville, a graduate of Leadership Greenville, and serves on the Board of Regents for the Greenville Chamber of Commerce's Leadership Greenville.He has four children - Samuel McBride Rhodes II, Elizabeth Caroline Rhodes, Skylar Sumter Rhodes, and Savannah DeLage Rhodes.