Matilda Pugh Daniel

Matilda Pugh Daniel was 96 and living in a neat three-room cabin with flower beds and vegetable rows on a bluff near Eufaula, Alabama. She was born on the plantation of James L. Pugh, later a U.S. senator, and was a full-grown young woman during the war. She worked in the house for her mistress, the daughter of General John Linguard Hunter. As a child she played with the Pugh children, building dams in the creek and playing pranks, like hiding red pepper in old Black Bob's chewing tobacco and turning a captured skunk loose in the quarters.

When she grew up she married Joe Daniel, a house servant, in the parlor, with her mistress's father performing the ceremony. She wore a borrowed dress of white tarlatan with a pink bow and a pink ribbon in her hair, and the whole plantation held a party in the backyard. Afterward she still worked in the house, where no one else was trusted to wash the julep glasses or polish the silver.

After the war the Pughs moved to Washington, and their daughter offered Matilda paid work as her maid, but she stayed because Joe had consumption. He died a year later, leaving her with four small children. She worked for wages on the plantation until the house burned, then moved to Eufaula and bought her cabin with money she had saved. Relatives in Detroit sent her a little money.