On 30 May 1900, Littleton, New Jersey, Alice (Hennion) Dixon,
dau. of Horatio Hennion and Margaret Jane Service, copied from her
mothers notes, and that is as follows: It was 3 April when I was
ushered into this world at London Creek, SC, and it seemed to grow
larger all the time. She tells about the various trees and other
plants in SC, and she writes about spinning and weaving, and says her
sister Eliza would weave their dresses. She writes about making
quilts, and says filling quilts fell to her lot, but she would rather
care for the chickens, geese, turkeys and peafowl, and to weave. She
states that her mother made fly brushes from the feathers of the
peacocks, they were used to brush flies away from the table, and would sell these at Coopersville for 50 cents each.

     The Broad River was about a mile and a half away, and
Coopersville was built on it. We used to cross over it in a flat boat
to go to church after the bridge was swept away by a flood. She says
her father was a stone and brick mason, and that he died when she was
about nine years of age. We raised lots of cotton on the farm, also
hogs and sheep, and spun the wool from the sheep.

     My brother James died about two years before father did, and not
a great while after that our house was burned to the ground. She
mentions a young slave named Joe, and said that Mary Ellen went away
and told her to stay, but she went to Uncle Robert's, but before
leaving she put a board on the fire (they apparently had a fire built
outside), and told the slave Joe not to let it go out.

She then says that when she started for home from uncle Robert's that a cousin walked part way with her, and when she arrived at the gate she saw the house afire and ran back to her uncles, but he could only salvage a few things. Apparently the negro slave had let the fire become to large and sparks had ignited the house. That broke up our home and changed things around considerably.

     We went to live with my brother Thomas, who was married to Sarah
McKown, (think that should be spelled McCown. L.L.D.), but I didn't
like that much. In 1853 my sister Eliza, who lived in Georgia, sent
for mother and myself to come and live with her, as her husband James
Gilmer (this is followed by Andrew, Andy, Gilmer in parenthesis
L.L.D.) had the gold fever and had gone to California to make his
fortune and never returned, leaving her with 4 children to struggle
with. Ma and I got ready and in the fall William Ferguson came for us
and I bid farewell to my native home for 21 years. She states that she went back to visit a few months before her mother died, but it looked so desolate and deserted. So many had gone to war and never returned.