Allen Sims

Allen Sims was interviewed in rural Lee County, Alabama, on the same place where he was born. He was the youngest of a large family: Chaney, Peggy, Judy, Sara, Phoebe, King, Alex, Jordan and Allen. His parents, also named Allen and Kitty Sims, came from Virginia with their enslavers, Jimmie and Creasie Sims. Some of the older children were born in Virginia and the rest in Alabama.

He described a log cabin with a stick-and-dirt chimney, ash-cake baked in the fireplace ("the best bread I ever ate"), long shirts of homespun Osnaburg cloth, and an elderly woman, Aunt Mandy, who watched the children while their mothers worked. The overseer, Tetter Hoberson, beat people often and blew the horn before daybreak to send them to the fields until dark. He was eventually dismissed. Allen was too young to understand the war, but he remembered Union soldiers burning the big house, barns and gin house, taking the horses and mules, and killing the milk cows, leaving almost nothing to eat.

After freedom the family stayed on. He later married Laura Frazier in a church wedding, and they raised two children to adulthood, Filmore and Mary Lou.