Clarissa Scales

Clarissa Scales was born enslaved by William Vaughan on his plantation at Plum Creek in Hays County, Texas. Her mother, Mary Vaughan, a woman over six feet tall, had been brought from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The last thing her mother saw when she left Baton Rouge was her own mother standing on a wooden block to be sold. After freedom her mother became a midwife. Her father, a field worker with long whiskers and a goatee, died about a year before her mother, who, Clarissa said, grieved herself to death.

As a girl Clarissa tended the fires under the wash kettles, burning corn cobs, and drove the hogs in each evening with a plaited rawhide whip. She married at fifteen. When interviewed at 79 she owned a small farm near Austin but lived with her son Arthur at 1812 Cedar Avenue in Austin.