Excerpt from Recollections Written in the Library of Congress, Washington

Sixty years today since my young mother went through her first and vital agony for me. She was just past twenty-one years old. She was a comely woman, married at twenty and settled on a little farm my father had cleared and tilled. The frame house he built for her and where I was born stands yet about two miles west of the Gastonia, N. C., railway station and near the tracks of the Southern Railway. It was called "Fairview." In 1870 my father sold this farm to Mr. Ed Whitesides and moved to Woodlawn, now called Mt. Holly.

We had several negro slaves, but they were freed before I can remember. What, I suppose, is about my earliest recollection was the removal to his mother's home somewhere in northwest Gaston County a negro boy who had been my caretaker or playmate. It seemed to me a momentous time. It appeared he was going a long way off. I do not remember his name. It must have been after the "Surrender" of Robert E. Lee, or about that time.

Mother was the oldest child of my Grandfather, Moses H. Rhyne. Her mother died in 1859, and, until her marriage to my father, March 20, 1860, she was the "little mother" and housekeeper for her father and his housefull of her brothers and sisters. They always called her "Sis." Her name was Susan Elizabeth Rhyne.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.