Lorenza Ezell

Lorenza Ezell was born on July 29, 1850, on Ned Lipscomb's plantation near Pacolet Station on Thicketty Creek in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. His mother, Maria, was enslaved by the Lipscombs; his father, Levi, was enslaved by Landrum Ezell, a Baptist preacher, and Lorenza took his surname from his father's enslaver. Fourteen people were enslaved on the place, most of them his family. He was the oldest of ten children.

The local patrollers called the Lipscomb people "Old Ned's free niggers" and resented them; once they caught his uncle and beat him nearly to death. The men were allowed garden patches to grow tobacco or cotton for sale. At church the enslaved sat in a shed behind the pulpit called "the coop." Lorenza remembered many songs from those days, including an older version of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," a song whose tune he said Union troops later used for a hymn, and the lullaby his mother sang while rocking the cradle. As a boy he dropped corn and carried water, and ran to the white children's school at noon to play base with them.

He said a meadow on the plantation was a place where people escaping from cruel enslavers could hide and rest, and that the enslaver fed them. Only later did he learn it was part of what was called the Underground Railroad. He moved to Brenham, Texas, in 1882 and later to Beaumont, where he lived in a small house almost hidden by vines and trees.