Mrs. Mary Crane

Mary Crane was born in 1855 on Mattie Williams's large farm in LaRue County, Kentucky, where her mother was enslaved. Her father was enslaved on Mr. Duret's farm nearby. When Duret's eldest daughter married Zeke Samples, she chose Mary's father to go with her as a wedding gift. Samples drank his fortune away, and everything he owned, including Mary's father, was put up at auction to pay his debts. Traders bought people at such sales and shipped them by the boatload to the sugar and cotton plantations around New Orleans, which is where the saying "sold down the river" came from.

Mary's grandfather, enslaved by Col. Bob Cowherd, begged Cowherd to buy his son. When a trader outbid him by $25 and Cowherd said he couldn't afford it, her grandfather offered the $25 he had saved, and Cowherd used it to buy her father and keep him from being sold south. When Lincoln's proclamation came, Mary remembered, her father and most of the younger men left to join the Union army, and hard times followed for those left behind.

About fifty years before the interview she came to Mitchell, Indiana, with her husband and four children, and she had lived there ever since.