The Rising Sun Recorder published a version of Ellen Cave’s narrative on March 19, 1937, and published her obituary on August 24, 1939. According to the obituary,
Mrs. Cave spent the first 12 years of her life as a slave in Taylor county, Kentucky, but two years after the civil war came to Carrollton, Ky., where she was united with her mother, who had been “sold down the river” to Louisiana several years before. At Carrollton, she married James Cave, who, like herself, had been a slave in Taylor county. To them were born 13 children. She later moved to Switzerland county where she spent a good portion of her life. For the past 30 years, however, she has made her home in this county.
When Ellen was interviewed by the WPA fieldworker, she was living in a garage in back of the Rising Sun courthouse, having lost her home and all of her possessions in the 1937 flood. Before the flood, Ellen had lived for many years on a farm about two and a half miles south of Rising Sun.
Ellen was born on a plantation in Taylor County, Kentucky. Her father died when she was a baby, and her mother was sold to someone in Louisiana when Ellen was a year old. Ellen was the property of a man who did not live up to the stereotype of the southern gentleman whose slaves refused to leave him after their freedom was declared. She said her owner was a “mean man” who drank heavily. He had twenty slaves, whom he fed only now and then. He was a southern sympathizer but joined the Union Army and became a captain in charge of a Union commissary. When he was suspected of and charged with giving supplies to the rebels, he was court-martialed, imprisoned, and sentenced to death. He escaped, however, by bribing a black guard. Ellen said that her master’s father was as bad as his son. The master’s father had a number of children with his many young female slaves, and he sold his own children down the river to Louisiana, where the work was so hard that many slaves died.
Ellen recalled seeing wagonloads of slaves sold down the river. In fact, she was put on the block several times herself, but she never was sold. She said that she would have preferred being sold, though, to continually facing the ordeal of the auction block.
While in slavery, Ellen worked as a maid in the house until she grew older, and then she was forced to do all kinds of outdoor labor. She remembered sawing logs in the snow all day. In the summer she pitched hay and did other kinds of work in the field. She learned to carry three buckets of water at the same time—two in her hands and one on her head—and she said she could still do it. On the plantation the chief article of food for the slaves was bran-bread; however, the master’s children were kind and often slipped them meat and other food. Ellen was in slavery for twelve years before she was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. Even after the war, her owner reluctantly gave her her freedom. Ellen left the plantation two years after the war and went to Carrollton, Kentucky, where she was reunited with her mother in 1867 and soon married James Cave, a former slave on a plantation near hers in Taylor County. She had thirteen children.
Ellen remembered seeing General Woolford and General Morgan of the Southern forces when they made friendly visits to the plantation. She saw General Grant twice during the war. She saw soldiers drilling near the plantation. Later she was caught and whipped by night riders, or patrollers, as she tried to slip out to black religious meetings.