Daniel Taylor

Daniel Taylor was born in Charleston, South Carolina. At about two and a half he and his mother were taken to Luverne, Alabama, and sold together for four hundred dollars. He did not remember the names of either man who enslaved them. He was fourteen at the surrender, living at Rocky Mount in Crenshaw County. As a boy he took to the woods and canebrakes whenever his mother came after him with a switch, and he said he knew every creature that lived there.

He remembered Jefferson Davis visiting the house and tipping him a quarter each time for holding his horse; he kept one as a keepsake for years. After freedom he worked first for Professor Mack Barnes at Highland Home and then spent decades as a janitor in the Montgomery public schools, including fifteen years at Baldwin High School, where he was still working in 1937. The proudest moment of his life was when the Herron Street School caught fire: after the children had marched out safely, the superintendent ran back in to check for anyone left, and Daniel ran through the smoke and falling rafters and dragged him out alive.