Bertha Pleasants Daniel: My great grandmother was the youngest of the big Howell family.

She and her husband joined a wagon train going out west.

Along the way she had a sick baby that died.

Then her husband got sick and died.

And she was pregnant, expecting my grandmother. So she bundled up her children and came back to Cary. She bought a big farm between here and Apex. My grandmother was born after she got back.

When the Civil War came along, they were well established and had all these slaves.

My grandmother was going to get married, and her mother had already told her which slaves she was going to give her as a wedding present. But her fiancé was killed in the war. So much later, she married my grandfather. By then the slaves were all free, so she didn't ever get the slaves.

Esther Ivey: The Methodist preacher lived in a house near ours (the Ivey Ellington Waddell house on Chatham Street). He was a peg-leg.

We had another peg-leg who lived on Chatham Street named Mr. Booker. Their peg-legs were the result of their service in the Civil War.

The Nancy Jones house on Chapel Hill Road is a pre-Civil War house, and is where Adolphus Jones lived. Hillsboro Street wound around Baucom Spring, then across the railroad to the Adolphus Jones house. The story goes that when the Civil War soldiers were coming, the Baucoms had a lot of jewelry and they wanted to hide it. The hearth was made of stone, so they took up a stone in the hearth, hollowed it out under there, put their jewelry in there and replaced the stone.

They had one of their slaves sit there. He had the gout so bad, and he had his leg all wrapped up.

When the Union soldiers came in to search the house, why, that poor old fellow there, they wouldn't bother him because he was a slave sitting there on the hearth to keep warm. So all the jewelry was saved.

There was an old colored man that we thought so much of living in town. He supposedly had come down with the soldiers as a servant, but after the war he stayed in Cary.

He would come to my home and milk the cows and start the kitchen fire in the mornings when my father was working in Raleigh. That's how he made his living. He could always get in, and he'd start the kitchen fire and warm his feet in the oven. He also chopped wood and odd jobs. Everybody burned wood so that kept him busy. He was a northerner, but he was left behind by the Civil War in Cary.