Mary Anna Patterson

Mary Anne Patterson, born Mary Anne Burleson, was born somewhere in Louisiana. At eighteen months old she and her mother were brought to Texas by a man named Turner and sold together to Col. Aaron Burleson of Rogers Hill, east of Austin. She said Burleson bought them both because he didn't believe in separating a child from its mother. When she was grown she was made wet nurse to one of the Burleson babies, and she worked in the loom room, where the quota was five cuts of thread a day; she could spin eight. At cotton-weighing time she listened to the counting at the scales and taught herself to count.

She remembered Burleson hauling lumber from the Bastrop pineries to build frame houses for the people he enslaved, her mother slipping out to dig sweet potatoes, and a Native man named Placido and his son coming by to be fed. At about twenty she married Alex Patterson, who had been brought from Tennessee by Joshua Patterson. After freedom they rented from Patterson and farmed about seven years.

They had fifteen children, six of them living, scattered across Texas, California, Oklahoma and Kansas. When interviewed she lived with her daughter, Elizabeth Lee, in Austin. She owned a 36-acre farm near Rogers Hill that her husband had bought, rented out for sixty dollars a year, and she refused to sell it though people kept asking. She received no pension, and she said she had worked harder since freedom than she ever worked before.