Ozella Harvey and four other descendants of Monticello gatekeeper Eliza Tolliver Coleman were interviewed together in 1995. All live in the Washington, DC, area and work (or worked) in various departments of the federal government. They shared their memories of Eliza Coleman’s daughters Lucy Coleman Barnaby Page and Grace Coleman Harris and recalled summers spent at the Monticello gatehouse. Members of the extended Coleman family lived at Monticello for more than a century—far longer than any of the property’s owners.
Families
Elizabeth Hemings
The majority of those interviewed for the Getting Word project trace their ancestry to Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings. According to her grandson Madison Hemings, she was the daughter of an English sea captain named Hemings and an enslaved woman. She came with her children to Monticello about 1775, part of the inheritance from John Wayles, Jefferson’s father-in-law. There she was a valued domestic servant. Over seventy-five of her descendants lived and worked at Monticello as butlers, seamstresses, weavers, carpenters, blacksmiths, gardeners, and musicians.
Elizabeth Hemings had twelve known children. According to Madison Hemings, six of them were fathered by Wayles (Robert, James, Thenia, Critta, Peter, and Sally). All of the men and women freed by Jefferson (either officially or unofficially) were her children or grandchildren. Oral histories passed through many generations of the descendants of her daughters Mary Hemings Bell, Betty Brown, and Sally Hemings include the tradition of descent from Jefferson.
Madison Hemings
Madison Hemings (1805-1877) was the second surviving son of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Madison Hemings learned the woodworking trade from his uncle John Hemmings. He became free in 1827, according to the terms of Thomas Jefferson’s will. Hemings and his brother Eston left Monticello to live with their mother, Sally Hemings, in the town of Charlottesville. Together they purchased a lot and built a two-story brick and wood house.
In 1831, Madison Hemings married a free woman of color, Mary McCoy. In the late 1830s the Hemingses left Virginia for a rural community in southern Ohio, where Mary Hemings’s family was already settled. Madison Hemings helped build several structures in the notoriously anti-black town of Waverly. He gradually accumulated property and, by 1865, he and his family were living on their sixty-six-acre farm in Ross County. Madison and Mary Hemings raised nine children. When his recollections were recorded in 1873, he gave his history in a matter-of-fact manner, referring to Jefferson as his father a number of times. His reputation as a man of his word survived in the family of white neighbors to the present day.
Clara Lee Fisher
Clara Fisher, artist and counselor for a non-profit social service agency, is the mother of two boys and a graduate of Duquesne University. Her father, Edward James Lee, died when she was only eight. She remembers helping him in his vegetable garden and accompanying him on his rounds as a constable, serving subpoenas. She said, “My father always told me that Thomas Jefferson was his great-great-grandfather.” She is thus only four generations removed from Madison Hemings of Monticello. In 2009, a letter she wrote to Jefferson on the occasion of Barack Obama’s inauguration was published in Newsweek magazine.
Mary McCoy Hemings
Madison Hemings’s wife, Mary, was born into a mixed-race family of free blacks who lived near Monticello. Her mother was Eliza Hughes McCoy, daughter of a white landowner, Stephen Hughes, and his slave Chana (Chaney), whom he freed in 1798. Mary McCoy and Madison Hemings married in 1831 and lived with his mother, Sally Hemings, in a house on the main road west of Charlottesville.
After Sally Hemings’s death, the Hemingses sold their house and left for southern Ohio, settling on the border of Ross and Pike counties. They joined a rural community populated by many other mixed-race families from Albemarle County, including Mary McCoy Hemings’s own extended family, some of whom were involved in the Underground Railroad.
Mary and Madison Hemings raised nine children and spent their last years on their sixty-six-acre farm in Ross County.
Betty Ann Fitch
Betty Ann Fitch is part of an extended family that worked and lived at Monticello for more than a century. She earned her master’s degree in English and became a teacher. She was particularly close to her grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Henderson Fitch, who was orphaned at age four and taken in by the Levy-Mayhoff family, the owners of Monticello. Mary Elizabeth Henderson lived with and worked for the Mayhoffs for more than twenty years, spending long periods in New York City as well as Monticello. She married Thomas Jefferson Fitch, the Monticello coachman and chauffeur. Betty Ann Fitch is her family’s history-keeper and treasures a quilt made by her grandmother and her sewing circle.
Jane Aileen Gordon Floyd
Jane Floyd was born in St. Louis but spent summers at the Selma, Ohio, farm of her maternal grandparents, John Penn and Barbara Ann Woodson. She first learned of her lineage when she shared her elopement plans with her mother, Jane Ann Woodson Gordon (1890–1972). “That’s how she happened to tell me about being descended from Thomas Jefferson.”
Mrs. Floyd studied at Stowe Teacher’s College and the University of Southern California, among many other institutions, and worked as a teacher. She married Samuel Kaiser and had two sons, Arthur and James. When Arthur was denied admission to an all-white Catholic school in 1943, Mrs. Floyd fought to desegregate Catholic schools in St. Louis. Two years later, “they opened them up,” she recalled. Both of her sons became successful businessmen. James Kaiser is a founder of the Black Executive Leadership Council.
Joseph Fossett
Monticello blacksmith Joseph Fossett, freed by Jefferson in his will, had to struggle to reunite his family after they were sold at the dispersal sale in 1827. With the support of his free relatives, including his mother, Mary Hemings Bell, he had achieved the freedom of his wife, Edith Hern Fossett, and five of their ten children by 1837. They then moved to Ohio, settling in Cincinnati by 1843.In this thriving city on the dividing line between slavery and freedom, the Fossetts did not turn their backs on those still in bondage. Joseph Fossett and his sons William, Daniel, and Jesse pursued the blacksmithing trade and the whole family actively participated in helping fugitive slaves traveling the Underground Railroad. Almost all of the Fossett children reached Ohio before their parents’ deaths. It took until 1850 in the case of their son Peter Fossett, who became a renowned minister.
Joseph and Edith Fossett’s descendants include artists, attorneys, caterers, civil servants, and musicians. In every generation Fossetts fought for freedom and equality, the most famous among them being William Monroe Trotter.
Rosemary Medley Ghoston
Donald Gillette
Donald Gillette, a retired millwright and union official, came to Charlottesville in 2007 with his wife, Margaret, and his cousins Phyllis Williams and Jeniece Johnson. Phyllis Williams had, in 2006, been the first descendant of Edward and Jane Gillette to make contact with the Getting Word project. She had been researching her Gillette ancestors without knowing of their connection to Monticello. Don Gillette’s father, Harry Gillette, had left Albemarle County after the death of his father Moses Gillette. He never spoke about his Virginia past, although father and son did at one time visit the family graveyard northwest of Charlottesville.
Margaret Gillette
Moses Gillette
Moses Gillette was the son of Moses Gillette, a cooper at Monticello, and his wife Martha. The elder Moses made pails and firkins in his own time to sell to the Monticello household. He was sold after Jefferson’s death to a local miller. After emancipation in 1865, he moved to southern Ohio to live near his brother Israel Gillette Jefferson.
The younger Moses remained in Albemarle County, buying ten acres of land across the Rivanna River from the Hydraulic Mills. He married three times and cared for a broad range of family members, raising more than twenty children. His descendants were unaware of the family’s connection to Monticello until 2006 and were pleased to learn of their ancestors’ contributions to it. They also spoke of the reluctance of the older generation to discuss the past: “We came from one of those families that didn’t talk a lot.”