had been helped to escape and gave her up as lost. About two years after
that a neighbor, on a closely farm, was in 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 Prestonsburg, Kentucky now is.

A Dr. David Cox, physician from Scott County, Virginia, who treated Mr.
Whitaker for a cancer, saw this slave girl, who had become a strong
healthy young woman, and Mr. Whitaker unable 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 over the broom stick.

Among 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 Emancipation Proclamation, by President Lincoln, in 1865, John
managed to get four years of schooling where he learned to read and
write and become very proficient in arithmetic.

He says that had he had the opportunity to study that we have today he
could have been the smartest man in the United States. He also says,