Henderson, George
Item
-
Title
-
Henderson, George
-
Gender
-
Male
-
Biography
-
George Henderson was born on May 10, 1860, near Versailles in Woodford County, Kentucky. His father was Bradford Henderson; his mother is unknown. He was one of twenty-one siblings, although including him, only six lived past childhood. Those who survived were three brothers (Milford, Sa, and Joe) and two sisters (Elle and Betsy). George, his father, and possibly his siblings were enslaved to the Cleveland family and lived in log cabins on a 400-acre plantation. The cabin in which George lived had two ground-level rooms and two lofts. He slept on a trundle bed with a straw tick (a mattress made of a woven material filled with straw). In the summer, George had cotton clothing, but in winter wore linsey and denim.
During the day, George pulled weeds, fed chickens, and helped care for the pigs. He remembered one pig that required a pen with a ten-foot fence due to its penchant for running away and being particularly difficult to track down. When his father went to hunt, usually possums or rabbits, he would go along carried on his father’s back. Corn shucking was a big event after it was harvested in the fall. George and his siblings were never taught to read or write. As he recalled, they had no overseer and, as children, had been whipped for getting too close to traveling wagons headed toward Indiana. They had church on the plantation but would go from one to another to hear preaching. Though it is now known if George himself was ever baptized, he remembered a white preacher named Reuben Lee from Versailles would baptize enslaved persons in the pond on Mr. Chiller’s property because he was an “honest man.” After the Civil War, George, his family, and many others stayed on the Cleveland plantation for about a year. Much later, George would marry Lucy Mason. Together, they would have two girls and a boy. By 1941, Geroge Henderson was a grandfather to eight.
-
Relationship
-
Slaveholder(s): Cleveland, unknown
-
Bibliographic citation(s)
-
Federal Writers' Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 7, Kentucky, Bogie-Woods with combined interviews of others. 1936. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn070/.