Charley Hurt

Charley Hurt was born on John Hurt's plantation near Maxeys in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, where nearly a hundred people were enslaved. "I'm borned in slavery and not 'shamed of it," he said, "'cause I can't help how I'm borned." His family lived in a one-room log cabin about ten by twenty feet, chinked with mud and straw.

His first job was tending the smokehouse at hog-killing time, keeping the fire smoldering under the hams and packing the meat in salt. He also carried the mail and ran errands. He remembered the enslaver putting a tub of whiskey in the yard every Christmas Day, and said that the last Christmas before the surrender he drank so much he was sick, and never drank again.

All three of the enslaver's sons joined the Confederate army. Charley remembered the drums and fifes at the training camp nearby. One son was crippled by a cannon wheel, another sent home with fever, and the third came home with a shoulder wound that would not heal until an enslaved man named Jerry pulled out a scrap of coat cloth the bullet had carried in. Charley stayed with the Hurt family for five years after the war. In 1899 he moved to Fort Worth, Texas, where he still lived in the late 1930s.