Fountain [Fountaine] Cotton was born in North Carolina or Mississippi around 1828. Cotton was a Black man formerly enslaved by the family of John Whitaker Cotten. In the 1870 and 1880 censuses, he gave his last name as "Cotton," a slight derivation of the name of his former enslavers. After the war, he worked as a gardener and a brick mason in Raleigh (Wake County), at which place he died on September 12, 1880.