Bill McRay

Bill McRay was born in 1851 in Milam, fifteen miles north of San Augustine, Texas, and brought to Jasper in 1854. He was the brother of C. B. McRay. They were enslaved by a Colonel McRay, who held about forty people and, Bill said, never struck any of them.

Neighboring enslavers were another story. He described Dr. Neyland of Jasper, who held seventy-five or eighty people. When two men, Tom and Ike, ran away, Neyland caught them with bloodhounds; one man killed a hound with a club, and the dog was cooked and the men forced to eat part of it before being beaten. As a boy, Bill and two white friends, Coley McRay and Henry Mann, would sneak around to watch the whippings at the log behind the old Jasper jail. Both white boys later went to the war and never came back. He told of two brothers, Safe and John Grant, taken from the jail by a crowd, whipped and salted so that they could be heard screaming a mile away, and of men hanged near Jasper during and after slavery.

After freedom Bill became an expert cook. He cooked for Captain Kelly's military camps for twenty-one years, then on boats on the Neches and Angelina rivers and in hotels, about forty years in all. He said he had worked for every sheriff of Jasper County except the latest one. He lived in Jasper, Texas.