“After arriving at Hanover, Pennsylvania, it was easy for us to get transportation farther north.  They made their way to Scranton, Pennsylvania, in which place they both secured positions in the same family.  Father and mother’s salary combined was $27.50 per month.  They stayed there until 1869.  In the meantime I was being taught at a Quaker mission in Scranton.  When we come to Baltimore I entered the 7th grade grammar school in South Baltimore.  After finishing the grammar school, I followed cooking all my life before and after marriage.  My husband James Berry, who waited at the Howard House, died in 1927—­aged 84.  On my next birthday, which will occur on the 22nd of November, I will be 95.  I can see well, have an excellent appetite, but my grandchildren will let me eat only certain things that they say the doctor ordered I should eat.  On Christmas Day 49 children and grandchildren and some great-grandchildren gave me a Xmas dinner and one hundred dollars for Xmas.  I am happy with all the comforts of a poor person not dependant on any one else for tomorrow”.

Maryland
Dec. 13, 1937
Rogers

Page Harris, Ex-slave. 
Reference:  Personal interview with Page Harris at his home,
           Camp Parole, A.A.C.  Co., Md.

“I was born in 1858 about 3 miles west of Chicamuxen near the Potomac River in Charles County on the farm of Burton Stafford, better known as Blood Hound Manor.  This name was applied because Mr. Stafford raised and trained blood hounds to track runaway slaves and to sell to slaveholders of Maryland, Virginia and other southern states as far south as Mississippi and Louisiana.

“My father’s name was Sam and mother’s Mary, both of whom belonged to the Staffords and were reared in Charles County.  They reared a family of nine children, I being the oldest and the only one born a slave, the rest free.  I think it was in 1859 or it might be 1860 when the Staffords liberated my parents, not because he believed in the freedom of slaves but because of saving the lives of his entire family.

“Mrs. Stafford came from Prince William County, Virginia, a county on the west side of the Potomac River in Virginia.  Mr. and Mrs. Stafford had a large rowboat that they used on the Potomac as a fishing and oyster boat as well as a transportation boat across the Potomac River to Quantico, a small town in Prince William County, Va., and up Quantico Creek in the same county.

“I have been told by my parents and also by Joshua Stafford, the oldest son of Mr. Stafford, that one Sunday morning on the date as related in the story previously Mrs. Stafford and her 3 children were being rowed across the Potomac River to attend a Baptist church in Virginia of which she was a member.  Suddenly a wind and a thunder storm arose causing the boat to capsize.  My father was fishing from a log raft in the river, immediately went to their rescue.  The wind blew the raft towards the centre of the stream and in line with the boat.  He was able without assistance to save the whole family, diving into the river to rescue Mrs. Stafford after she had gone down.  He pulled her on the raft and it was blown ashore with all aboard, but several miles down the stream.  Everybody thought that the Staffords had been drowned as the boat floated to the shore, bottom upwards.