Richardson was born at the Priestley Plantation in St. James Parish, Louisiana,Rail, Tony: "William Priestley Vindicated, with a Previously Unpublished Letter", Enlightenment and Dissent, no. 28 (2012), 150–195. and spent part of his childhood in New Orleans, where his family lived on Julia Row in a red brick house designed by the architect Alexander T. Wood.Mary Louise Christovich, et al. [ed.], New Orleans Architecture, v. 2: The American Sector (Gretna, LA), p. 174. He was the great-grandson of inventor and philosopher Joseph Priestley, who is usually credited with the discovery of oxygen.
