Lucy Thomas

Lucy Baldwin Thomas was born in a log cabin by Fern Lake in Harrison County, Texas, on the plantation of Dr. William Baldwin, who worked a hundred acres with about eighty-five enslaved people. Her father, Ike, had been bought in Alabama; her mother, Nancy, was born in Virginia and bought in the New Orleans slave market for $1,100. Lucy started hoeing in the field at nine. Her grandmother Barbara told of Alabama slaveholders who dragged people behind mules and beat them raw. Lucy said the Baldwins were not like that, and that a whiskey barrel stood on the porch for the hands on their way to the field.

After the war she quit the field to attend three months of school run by a Northerner, and she saw groups of Black men with bandaged heads going to report Klan attacks to the provost marshal. Three years after freedom her family moved to the Haggerty place. She told of the widow there, said to have been married first to a Caddo chief and then to Colonel Haggerty, who she said kept a woman chained to a loom for a year and, when freedom was coming, poisoned a number of the people she held and buried them at night.

On February 12, 1869, Lucy and Anthony Thomas went to Marshall and were married, the day before the steamboat Mattie Stephens burned with great loss of life. They were together 55 years and raised seven children. After his death she kept farming until about 1934, then went to live with a son at Baldwin Switch, on land that had once been part of the Baldwin plantation.