My father was to be sold at auction, along with all of the rest of Zeke Samples’ property.  Bob Cowherd, a neighbor of Matt Duret’s owned my grandfather, and the old man, my grandfather, begged Col.  Bob to buy my father from Zeke Samples to keep him from being “sold down the river.”  Col.  Bob offered what he thought was a fair price for my father and a “nigger-trader” raised his bid “25 [TR:  $25?].  Col. said he couldn’t afford to pay that much and father was about to be sold to the “nigger-trader” when his father told Col.  Bob that he had $25 saved up and that if he would buy my father from Samples and keep the “nigger-trader” from getting him he would give him the money.  Col.  Bob Cowherd took my grandfather’s $25 and offered to meet the traders offer and so my father was sold to him.

The negroes in and around where I was raised were not treated badly, as a rule, by their masters.  There was one slave owner, a Mr. Heady, who lived nearby, who treated his slave worse than any of the other owners but I never heard of anything so awfully bad, happening to his “niggers”.  He had one boy who used to come over to our place and I can remember hearing Massa Williams call to my grandmother, to cook “Christine, give Heady’s Doc something to eat.  He looks hungry.”  Massa Williams always said “Heady’s Doc” when speaking of him or any other slave, saying to call him, for instance, Doc Heady would sound as if he were Mr. Heady’s own son and he said that wouldn’t sound right.

When President Lincoln issued his proclamation, freeing the negroes, I remember that my father and most all of the other younger slave men left the farms to join the Union army.  We had hard times then for awhile and had lots of work to do.  I don’t remember just when I first regarded myself as “free” as many of the negroes didn’t understand just what it was all about.

Ed. Note:  Mrs. Crane will also pose for a picture.

Submitted by: 
William Webb Tuttle
District No. 2
Muncie, Indiana

Slaves in Delaware county
Rosa Barber
812 South Jefferson
Muncie, Indiana

Rosa Barber was born in slavery on the Fox Ellison plantation at North Carden[TR:?], in North Carolina, in the year 1861.  She was four [HW:  ?] years old when freed, but had not reached the age to be of value as a slave.  Her memory is confined to that short childhood there and her experiences of those days and immediately after the Civil War must be taken from stories related to her by her parents in after years, and these are dimly retained.