Martha Spence Bunton

Martha Spence Bunton was born on New Year's Day, 1856, on John Bell's plantation at Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Bell sold her, her mother and her four sisters to Joseph Spence, which is how she got her name, and Spence brought them to Texas in wagons; the children walked in the mornings and the adults in the afternoons. She knew they had reached Texas when a norther blew in and sent weeds and leaves rolling, which the children at first thought were rabbits, an animal they had never seen.

Spence settled at Montopolis near Austin. Martha carried dinner pails of meat, cabbage and biscuits to the field workers. Her father, who belonged to a man in Tennessee, was later bought by Spence and joined them. When her mother died of diphtheria, her father raised the children, making huge rye biscuits on Sunday mornings. The children had no butter and sometimes asked the white children for a piece of buttered biscuit.

After freedom her father sent the children to a white teacher, and Martha went through the sixth grade and could read and write. At twenty-four she married Andy Bunton in 1880 at a big wedding where someone stole a whole turkey. They had nine children, three of whom were living when she was interviewed. After Andy was paralyzed by a stroke, she cared for him while cutting wood, carrying water, washing and cooking. In old age she lived with her sister Susan on twelve wooded acres east of Austin that her father had bought for $25 an acre.