Rev. Squire Dowd

The Rev. Squire Dowd was born April 3, 1855, enslaved by General W. D. Dowd, who held about fifty people on a 500-acre plantation three miles from Carthage in Moore County, North Carolina. His mother was Jennie Dowd and his father Elias Kennedy; he said it was hard to keep up with your father in slavery times, since there were few legal marriages. His mother later went to Georgia with his sister, whose husband worked in turpentine, and died there at 70. His father died in Moore County at 82, and Squire attended the funeral.

He was a house boy. He remembered prayer meetings held at night in the cabins, sitting in a railed-off section at the back of the white church, corn shuckings that ended with the workers carrying the enslaver around in a chair and combing his hair, and earning money by making baskets and clearing land on moonlit nights. During the war some enslaved people stole food for Confederate deserters, who paid them for it. He said he didn't learn he was free until five years after the war.

He held what he called a "conservative view" of slavery: he blamed abuse on patrollers and overseers rather than slaveholders, and he blamed Reconstruction-era politics for turning freedpeople against their former enslavers. He taught school for four years, was ordained in 1885, and had been a minister for fifty years. He lived in Moore County until 1889, then moved to Raleigh, where he lived at 202 Battle Street.