Louis Fowler

Louis Fowler was born in Macon County, Georgia, on Robert Beaver's plantation, where about fifty people were enslaved. He pointed out his own red beard, brown eyes and light skin and told the interviewer to judge for himself who his father was, noting there was a man on the plantation over six feet tall with hair as red as brick. His mother married a man named Fowler, enslaved on Jack Fowler's neighboring place, and Louis later took his stepfather's name.

He described log cabins made windproof with clay and straw, family garden plots, and smoke-cured hams he said were better than anything since. As a boy he learned to card, spin and weave from his mother, dyeing cloth with walnut, cherry and red-oak bark or by burying it in red clay. Allen Beaver, the plantation preacher and fiddler, "preached from his heartfelt." The only whipping he remembered on the place was given by patrollers: a man named Jack who kept slipping off without a pass, who began bellowing for mercy before the first lick fell and never went off without a pass again.

After freedom Louis farmed for several years, then worked in the Fort Worth packing plants. When interviewed at 84 he lived at 2706 Holland Street in Fort Worth.