"There were twelve children in the family, three boys and nine girls. Only two boys of this family are living, Walter and myself. "Mother and father said at the beginning of the war that the white folks said it would not last long and that in the first years of the war they said one southern soldier could whup three Yankee soldiers, but after awhile they quit their braggin. Most everything to eat and wear got scarce. Sometimes you couldn't git salt to go in the vegetables and meat that was cooked. People dug up the salty earth under their smoke houses, put water with it, drained it off and used it to salt rations. "There came stories that the Yankees had taken this place and that they were marching through Georgia into South Carolina. They burned Columbia, the Capitol of South Carolina, and had both whites and black scared, they were so rough. The Yankees stole, burned, and plundered. Mother said they hated South Carolina cause they started the war there. They burned a lot of the farm houses. The army, so my father and mother said, was stretched out over a distance of sixty-two miles. Jest think of a scope of country sixty two miles wide with most of the buildings burned, the stock killed, and nothing to eat. The southern army and the northern army had marched back and forth through the territory until there was nothing much left. Where Sherman's army stopped and ate and fed their horses the Negroes went and picked up the grains of corn they strowed there and parched and ate them. People also parched and ate acorns in South Carolina. "Father and mother got together after the war and they moved to a widow lady's place by the name of Ann Hunter, near Ridgeway. She was good to us and we stayed there sixteen years. Ann Hunter had three sons, Abraham, George and Henry. Abraham went to South America on a rambling trip. He decided to stay there. He was a young man then and he married a Spaniard. When he came home to see his mother it was the year of the earthquake in 1886. He was a grown man then and he brought his wife and children with him. He had three children, all of them spoke Spanish and could not understand their grandmother's talk to them. His wife was a beautiful woman, dark with black hair and blue eyes. She just worshipped her husband. They stayed over a month and then returned to South America. I have never seen 'em since or had any straight news of them. "Mother and father lived on the farm until they died, with first one ex-slave owner and another. They said they had nothing when the war ended and that there was nothing to do. "I stayed with my mother and father near Ridgeway until I was 21 years of age. I left the farm then and went to work on the railroad. I thought I was the only man then. I was so strong. I worked on the railroad one year then I went to the Stone mountain Rock Quarry in Georgia.