Sam Kilgore

Sam Kilgore was born on July 17, 1845, on John Peacock's plantation near Memphis, Tennessee, a place of about a thousand acres and nearly a thousand enslaved people. The cabins stood in long rows. He said the enslaver kept order without whipping by threatening to sell people to the slave trader, which frightened them more than anything; from the next plantation they could hear people begging for mercy as they were whipped.

At four, Sam was taken into the big house as errand boy for the enslaver's son, Frank, and later became his valet. When Sam was about eight, Frank was chosen to study at a military academy in England, and Sam went with him. He never forgot the voyage: becalmed for days in fog, desperately seasick, and then homesick. In England they would search the cotton bales on the wharf for the Memphis gin mark, hoping to find one from home.

When they returned, the war had begun. Frank joined the Confederate army and Sam went with him as his valet, until Frank was promoted and sent to Florida. Sam said he had three enslavers in all and was enslaved for twenty years. He later served in the Spanish-American War. He came to Fort Worth in 1889, learned cement work, and in 1917 started his own cement contracting business, which he was still running when interviewed in his nineties.