6
33

had to furnish the servant his living. Thre free employee is paid only

j while working; when sick, disabled or when too old to work, his employer

I i~ no longer responsible.

L ~ A~ slave owner, in West Virginia, bought a thirteen year old black girl

at an auction. ~Then this girl was taken to his home she escaped, and after searching every where, without finding her, he decided that she had been helped to escape and gave her up as lost. About two years after that a neighbor, on a close‘.~y farm, was i.n the woods feeding his cattle, he saw what he first thought was a bear, running into the thicket from among his cows. Getting help, he rounded up the cattle and searching the thick woodland, finally found that what he had supposed was a wild. animal, was the long lost fugitive black girl. She had lived all this time in caves, feeding on nuts, berries, wild apples and milk from cows, that she could catch and milk. Returned to her master she was sold to a Mr. Morgan Whittaker who lived near where Prestons.. burg, Kentucky now is.

	A Dr. David Cox, physician from Scott County, Virginia, who treated Mr. ~hittaker for a caneer, saw this slave girl, who had become a strong healthy young woman, and ‘Mr. Whit~ker uiiahle to otherwise pay his doctor bill, let Dr. Davis have her for the debt.

	At this time the slave girl was about twenty.-one years of age, and Dr. Davis took her home to Scott County, Virginia where he married her to his only other slave, George Cox, by the ceremony of laying a broom on the floor and having the two young negroes step ovér the broom stick.

	~zaong the children of George Cox and his wife was Rev. John R. Cox, Col. who now lives in Catlettsburg, Kentucky, and is probably the only living ex~ slave in this county.

	After the Emansipation Proclamation, by President Lincoln, in 1865, John managed to get four years of schooling where he learned to read and write