Anne Maddox

According to the family Bible, Anne Maddox was 113 years old when she was interviewed in a tiny cabin about eight miles from Opelika, Alabama, where she lived with her youngest child, Zora. She was so frail she had to be wheeled onto the porch for her photograph. She was born in Virginia in 1824 to Charlie and Rhody Heath and had two brothers and two sisters. She was enslaved by Tom Rutherford and later sold to Bill Maddox of Alabama.

She remembered the journey from Virginia at age 13: traveling in wagons, sleeping in tents, and each morning being made to wash and dress before being put on the auction block, with buyers crowding in "from everywhere." On the Maddox plantation the cabins were log huts with mud chinking and no floors, the children ate bread and milk from a wooden trough, and a horn woke the workers before day. She drew water, worked as a house girl and then in the fields, and walked her enslaver's children to school, though enslaved people there were forbidden to learn to read and write.

When Union troops came, the household was ordered to hide the food and valuables. After freedom she stayed until she was grown and then married Doc Maddox. She joined the church at Gold Hill, Alabama, and said she felt so good she shouted for three days and couldn't eat a bite.