Sarah Gudger

Sarah Gudger said she was born September 15, 1816, about two miles from Old Fort on the old Morganton road in North Carolina, which would have made her 121 when Marjorie Jones interviewed her in Asheville in May 1937. The Federal Writers' Project checked her claim against family records and found that the people and events she described, including the dates of the white families' births, marriages and deaths, matched what she said. She was enslaved by Andy Hemphill in the Swannanoa valley, and after his death by his son William. Her father, Smart, belonged to Joe Gudger, who leaned on him for everything. She told how Gudger, despondent over his children, once said he had a mind to drown himself, how Smart led him back to the house, and how a few days later he was found hanged in the barn.

"I never knowed what it was to rest," she said. She worked from before dawn until late at night: in the fields, chopping wood, hoeing corn, dragging timber down from the mountains in rain or snow until her clothes froze to her body, and carding and spinning until ten. She said she took "a thousand lashings" in her day, with her hands tied in front of her "just like a mule." She slept on a pile of rags in the corner until seven years after freedom, and on winter nights she slipped out barefoot through the snow two miles to an aunt's house for hot cornbread. She described the terror when a speculator walked through the fields with the enslaver, looking people over.

When interviewed, she lived with distant cousins at 8 Dalton Street in South Asheville, walking with one crutch, and beat out the rhythm of marching Confederate soldiers on the floor.