71 year-old farmer John R. Estes, talking to "R.P.T.", on March 21st 1930"....................I was born tho' on my grandfather's plantation 'bout four miles from here at what they called old Martin's ferry....Yessum, my grandfather Marius Martin was French and that ferry was named fer him, that's how come it sounds different from the way you call it. Yes, he wuz French all right, an him and his brother come over here on a boat when they wuz little fellers.
"I've heered her [Ma] say when they come to Alabama in the early days they come in a covered wagon, en that little chair over there come right with em. They were 'mong the first to cross the river, the [1st?] white settlers round here, and they had to build a raft by tying poles together so as to cross the 'Bigbee [Tombigbee River]".
He tells of the family slave, Lewis: "if old Lewis Martin ... had lived I'd have as much as any-body the rest of my days."
When the Northern troops neared the area during the Civil War Estes' grandfather, a prosperous land speculator, gave Lewis an iron pot containing $150,000, with orders to bury it somewhere on the plantation. The grandfather had suffered dementia from the strain of wartime and soon died. A long time afterwards Lewis, on his deathbed from an infected tooth, sends for the young Estes, planning to reveal the location of the buried money.
"...but when I got there Lewis was as dead as a door nail. His wife wuz so skeered she couldn't recollect nothing he had said, jes 'a white oak', she kept mumbling and that was all. Well we looked fer a long time but didn't no body ever find nothing. T'was too much territory and too many white oaks."
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