Albert Todd

Albert Todd was born in Russellville, Kentucky, enslaved by Captain Hudson, who kept a fruit orchard. At eight years old, his job was to walk the enslaver's eleven-year-old daughter, Nannie, five miles to school and back, sitting on the school steps until she finished. He said he always loved her.

Captain Hudson was killed in the Civil War, and his widow packed two covered wagons and moved the household to Texas, settling on a farm near La Vernia. Albert remembered a neighboring white man who worked the people he enslaved so hard that he bought new ones every year, and who cut off an ear of each so they could be identified if they ran.

No one told Albert he was free, and he was held as a slave for about three years after emancipation. During that time a woman he called Mrs. Gribbs took control of him. She gave him one sausage and one biscuit a day, and once beat him unconscious for taking biscuits. He was planning to run away when his sisters found him and took him to the ranch where they worked. In the late 1930s he lived in San Antonio with his wife, daughter and two sons.