The Gordons of White Sulphur Springs, Part I

Mary Gordon of White Sulphur Springs was born a slave in Kentucky in 1853. Her husband John was a free person of color who came from Scotland to the United States with his employer. A trained chef, he worked as chef and baker in White Sulphur Springs’ Higgins House, the town’s main hotel. In 1895, he took a job as chef for a Canadian railway and died in a train accident just before the birth of the Gordons’ fifth child, Taylor. Mary took in laundry, provided nursing care for the community, an...