George Eatman

George Eatman was 93 when Mary A. Hicks interviewed him at Cary, North Carolina, in May 1937. He was enslaved by Gus Eatman at the old Templeton place on the Durham highway, among about twenty-five people. His mother and father were sold before he was old enough to remember them. "I raised myself," he said, "and I reckon I done a fair job of it." He grew up as the handy boy around the house.

Near the war's end, Confederate troops camped at Ephesus Church, and the next day he was sent to the mill on Crabtree Creek. Wheeler's cavalry stopped and questioned him on the road, and at the mill one of them took his mule and his corn, so he walked home through the woods carrying the saddle. Near the Morgan place he heard cannon and saw Union troops "as thick as the hairs on a man's head." They took the smokehouse key and all the meat, and shot every chicken, pig and calf in sight; the household was left living mostly on parched corn. All that was saved was a can of grease buried in the broom straw.

He remembered two local patrollers who kept bloodhounds and whipped people shamefully. After the war the family stayed on five or six years because they had nowhere else to go.