Bessie Dorsey was a descendant of Wormley and Ursula Hughes through their grandson Philip Evans Hughes (1853-1925). Mrs. Dorsey lived most of her life in Washington, DC, raising and providing an education to her son, George Harrod, who went on to hold several prominent positions in the federal government. Her relatives have relied on her memories in their exploration of their family history.
Families
Sarah Woodson Early
Sarah Woodson, the youngest child of Thomas and Jemima Woodson, exemplified her family’s commitment to the fields of education and religion. By the age of five, she had memorized large parts of the Bible. She graduated from Oberlin College in 1856 and then began her long career as a teacher in Ohio, North Carolina, and Tennessee. She was one of the first African American women on a college faculty, at Wilberforce University, of which her brother Lewis Woodson was a founding trustee.
In 1868 she married Jordan Winston Early, a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church and, as she wrote, assisted “in all of his most arduous duties.” She was national superintendent of the Colored Division of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and lectured widely on temperance, self-improvement, and the role of women. In 1894 she published a biography of her husband.
Reid Colbert
Nancy Durant Edmonds
Eliza Tolliver Coleman
In the words of a descendant, Eliza Tolliver Coleman lived “up on the mountain all of her life.” Members of her extended family lived and worked at Monticello over the course of a century—far longer than any of the property’s owners. According to family tradition, Eliza Coleman “came out of that Thomas Jefferson tree,” but her exact connection to Monticello’s enslaved families is not yet known. She married Thomas Coleman (1845-post 1910), a former slave of Joel Wheeler, manager of Monticello during and after the Civil War. They had eight children.
Thomas Coleman was an ox-team driver and Eliza Coleman was gatekeeper for Jefferson Monroe Levy, owner of Monticello from 1879 to 1923. The position eventually passed to her daughter Lucy Coleman Barnaby Page (1869-1956), who was a midwife in the local community as well as the gatekeeper. Descendants have vivid memories of summers spent at the Monticello gatehouse.
George Edmondson
Born in slavery in Lexington, Virginia, George Edmondson claimed his freedom in June 1864, when Union forces occupied the town. He evidently accompanied the army across the mountains into West Virginia after its defeat at Lynchburg a week later. He enlisted in the 45th regiment (later the 127th) of the U. S. Colored Infantry in Wheeling and took part in months of grueling trench warfare during the siege of Richmond and Petersburg. He was wounded, promoted to corporal, and was with the first Union troops to enter Petersburg. At war’s end, Edmondson was shipped with the rest of the all-black 25th Corps to the remote coast of Texas.
After his discharge, Edmondson returned to West Virginia, settling in Parkersburg with his wife, Maria McDowell, and their children. He worked in a foundry and glass works and soon owned his own home. A trustee of his Methodist church, he sent one of his sons to Wilberforce University. His obituary described him as “one of the leading citizens of Parkersburg of the older generation.”
Coralie Franklin Cook
Coralie Franklin Cook, Brown Colbert’s great-granddaughter, was born in slavery and became the first descendant of a Monticello slave known to have graduated from college. She was born in Lexington, VA, to Albert and Mary Elizabeth Edmondson Franklin (1829-1917). In 1880, Coralie Franklin graduated from Storer College in Harpers Ferry, WV. From this time, she was widely noted as a powerful public speaker. She taught elocution and English at Storer and then at Howard University.
In 1898 she married George William Cook (1855-1931), a Howard University professor and trustee. Coralie Cook served for twelve years as a member of the District of Columbia Board of Education. She was a founder of the National Association of Colored Women and a committed suffragist. About 1910, the Cooks became followers of the Baha’i faith. A longtime friend and admirer of Susan B. Anthony, she eventually became disillusioned by the women’s suffrage movement, feeling it had “turned its back on the woman of color.”
Robert H. Cooley III
Robert Cooley, attorney, judge, and magistrate, was the son of Ruth Golden and Robert H. Cooley II. He graduated from Virginia Union University and Howard University Law School. He spent eight years as an attorney in the U. S. Army, being awarded the Army Commendation Medal. Of his army service in Europe he said, “ I was free…I was not a black person. I was an American.”
His appointment as a federal magistrate for the Eastern District in 1976 made him, as he said, “the first black American to serve as a judge on the Federal District Court in Virginia’s history.” Cooley greatly admired his ancestor Lewis Woodson (“my hero”) and passed on the Woodson family’s emphasis on education to his children, who graduated from Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia, to which Cooley was denied admission because of his race.
Ethel Hughes Bolden
In 1996, four generations of the Hughes family of Fauquier County came to Monticello soon after learning of their descent from Rev. Robert Hughes of Union Run Baptist Church and head gardener Wormley Hughes of Monticello. The connection might have been broken because their ancestor, also Wormley Hughes (1851-1901), left Albemarle County with the Union army in the confusion at the end of the Civil War.
Ethel Bolden heard that her grandfather Rev. Wormley Hughes, who was known to be a very hard worker, pastored several churches in Fauquier County. Her father, John Henry Hughes, was a deacon in his church. Her niece Karen Hughes White noted, “You go down to Aunt Ethel’s and there are flowers all over the place.”
Martha Hearns Boston
Martha Boston, who carried on the Hern/Hearns family tradition of a belief in the importance of education, was the youngest of eight children of Bernard Clinton Hearns and Clara Jones Hearns. Her father, “a very progressive man” in her eyes, worked on the railroad to save money to buy the family farm. Her mother, “seeking the best for her children,” sent her as a child to Baltimore to live with a sister, so she would have the opportunity for better schooling. She and her six sisters all became teachers. A graduate of West Virginia State University in Education and Home Economics, she pursued graduate studies at Temple University and taught school in Albemarle County and elsewhere.
Ereselle Mercer Brooke
Ereselle Brooke and four other descendants of Monticello gatekeeper Eliza Tolliver Coleman were interviewed together in 1995. All live in the Washington, D.C., 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.
Betty Brown
In 1772, Elizabeth Hemings’s second daughter, Betty Brown, was the first of her family to come to Monticello, as the enslaved personal maid of Jefferson’s wife Martha. In the words of a member of Jefferson’s family, Betty Brown was “quite a personage on the mountain.” After almost sixty years of domestic work in the main house, she was one of the last of the Hemingses to live on the Monticello mountaintop, remaining there until the property was sold in 1831.
Described as “light colored & decidedly good looking,” Betty Brown had seven children who lived to adulthood. Among these were enslaved head gardener Wormley Hughes, enslaved Monticello butler Burwell Colbert, and enslaved nailmaker Brown Colbert. Her sons Edwin and Robert both became runaways after being given and sold away from Monticello. Her daughter Melinda Colbert Freeman married and lived in freedom in Washington, DC. Betty Brown died in the early 1830s, probably before her daughter Mary Colbert and son Brown Colbert chose to seek freedom in the African colony of Liberia in 1833.