Allen Brown

Allen Brown told his interviewers in Alabama that he was "nigh on to a hundred years old." He was born in Virginia. His mother's enslaver was moving from Virginia to Texas, and partway there he sold Allen and his mother to a man named McRea. McRea gave Allen to his daughter Julia, and when she married Henry Young, Allen became their carriage driver. Henry Young went off to the war and was killed at Gettysburg.

He remembered his years driving among the fashionable carriages of Eufaula, Alabama, but said that after the war "nothing never was the same," just hard times. When interviewed he was a thin, deaf old man with a short white beard, too old and broken down to work, getting along on what the welfare office gave him.