come a strong
healthy young woman, and Mr. Whitaker unable to otherwise pay his doctor
bill, let Dr. Davis have her for the debt.

At this time the slave girl was about twenty-one years of age, and Dr.
Davis took her home to Scott County, Virginia where he married her to
his only other slave, George Cox, by the ceremony of laying a broom on
the floor and having the two young negroes step over the broom stick.

Among the children of George Cox and his wife was Rev. John R. Cox, Col.
who now lives in Catlettsburg, Kentucky, and is probably the only living
ex-slave in this county.

After the Emancipation Proclamation, by President Lincoln, in 1865, John
managed to get four years of schooling where he learned to read and
write and become very proficient in arithmetic.

He says that had he had the opportunity to study that we have today he
could have been the smartest man in the United States. He also says,
that before freedom, the negroes in his neighborhood were allowed no
books, if found looking at a book a slave was whipped unmercifully.

John's master, in allowing his slaves to marry, was much more liberal
than most other slave owners, who allowed their slaves no such liberty.

As a rule negro men were not allowed to marry at all, any attempt to
mate with the negro women brought swift, sure horrible punishment and
the species were propogated by selected male negroes, who were kept for
that purpose, the owners of this privileged negro, charged a fee of one
out of every four of his offspring for his services.

The employing class of Kentuckians, many of them descendants of slave
owners, are prone to be reactionary in their attitude towards those who
toil, this is reflected in low wages and inferior working conditions, a
condition which affects both white and black labor alike, in many
sections of the state. (Bibliography: Rev. John R. Cox (colored)
Catlettsburg, Kentucky. Born 1852 (does not know day and month),
Minister A.M.E. Church. First truant officer Catlettsburg, Kentucky.
Interviewed Dec. 23, 1936.)

WAYNE CO.
(Gertrude Vogler)

[Mrs. Duncan:]

"After the War was over mammie's old man did not want us with them, so
he threatened to kill us. Then my old mammie fixed us a little bundle of
what few clothes we had and started us two children out to go back to
the Campbell family in Albany. The road was just a wilderness and full
of wild animals and varmints. Mammie gave us some powder and some
matc