We have seen the notices Guilford Horn published in 1850 seeking the return of a runaway enslaved man named Harry. Horn lived four miles north of Wilson in what was then Edgecombe County (and is now roughly just west of the Bridgestone tire plant.) He suggested that Harry might be “lurking” in the Texas neighborhood of Wilmington, North Carolina, where Sally Bozeman, his free-born wife, had recently moved.

Two years earlier, Guilford Horn had stood as bondsman for John Mathew Aldridge, a free man of color, who applied for a license in Edgecombe County to marry Catherine Bozeman, a free woman of color and likely the sister or close kin of Sally Bozeman.

In the 1850 census of Wilmington, there’s no sign of Sally, but: Matthew Ollage, 28; wife Catharine, 19; and sons William, 6 months, and J.H., 5. [John Henry Aldridge was Mathew Aldridge’s son by a first wife whose first name may’ve been Tabitha. John H. Aldridge’s children James Aldridge and Nina Faison Kornegay Hardy settled in Wilson in the early 1900s.] By 1860, Mathew and Catherine Aldridge were in Buck Swamp township, Wayne County (west of modern Pikeville), closer to his kin in southern Wayne County. Twenty year-old James Bosman lived with them and, like Mathew, worked as a railroad hand.