Jesse Scott, son of a Pamunkey Indian, was a violinist and dance band leader well known throughout Virginia. One contemporary recalled a dance at which Scott and his sons Robert and James formed the band: “Such music they made as the gods of Terpsichore will never hear again in this generation.” At the 1827 Monticello dispersal sale, Jesse Scott represented his wife’s family. He purchased his sister-in-law Edith Fossett and two of her children, so they would not be separated from their husband and father, Joseph Fossett.
Families
Robert Scott
Robert Scott was born free, the son of Sarah Bell and Jesse Scott, a free man of color whose mother was a Pamunkey Indian. The Scott trio (Robert, his brother James, and his father) were well known musicians who traveled all over Virginia playing at dances at private homes, mountain resorts, and the University of Virginia
Scott married Nancy Colbert, probably the daughter of Burwell and Critta Colbert of Monticello. He was able to purchase her and some of their nine children out of slavery. In 1857 Robert Scott, who had more than three-quarters white ancestry, successfully petitioned the court to be declared “not negro”–an intermediate status between white and black or “mulatto.”
Robert Scott lived in the Bell-Scott house on Charlottesville’s main street for almost ninety years. He was a rich source of recollections about Jefferson and, at his death, was described as “a man who in the course of a long life never failed to command the respect of his fellow citizens.”
Sarah Bell Scott
Sarah Jefferson Bell, the daughter of Mary Hemings and white merchant Thomas Bell, lived in freedom on Charlottesville’s main street. Her husband, Jesse Scott, with their sons James and Robert Scott, led a dance band well known throughout Virginia.
John Freeman Shorter
John Freeman Shorter was raised in freedom in Washington, D.C. In 1863 he left Delaware County, Ohio, for Boston, in order to enlist in one of the first black regiments to be organized, the 55th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. He became one of only three fully-commissioned black officers in the regiment; the other two lieutenants, James Monroe Trotter and William H. Dupree, were also connected to Monticello.
Despite promises of equal treatment, the pay of the men of the Massachusetts regiments was half that of white soldiers and Shorter, like Trotter, became a leader in the fight for equal pay. He was wounded at the Battle of Honey Hill near Charleston, South Carolina, in November 1864. After being honorably discharged in 1865, he returned to Ohio to marry his fiancé, but died within weeks of reaching home. Shorter’s brother Charles Henry Shorter served in the 22nd U. S. Colored Infantry and survived the war to be an officer in a Washington post of the Grand Army of the Republic.
Allen Sim
Jillian Atkin Sim
Jillian Sim, a writer and mother of two, was raised in the white world. Her grandmother, Ellen Love, an actress, told her many family stories heard from her mother, Anita Hemmings Love. She mentioned connections to Jefferson and an English sea captain, but never spoke of descent from enslaved people. Jill Sim learned of her African American ancestry only after her grandmother’s death in 1994. She published an account of her discovery in American Heritage, which tells the story of Anita Hemmings, who made headlines around the world in 1897 when it was revealed that she was passing for white at Vassar College.
Jill Sim believes, but cannot yet say with certainty, that she is descended from Elizabeth Hemings’s son Peter Hemings, a Monticello cook and brewer who worked as a tailor after he became free in 1827, purchased by a relative at the Monticello estate sale.
Shallie Barrett Marshall
Andrew Jackson Roberts
Andrew J. Roberts was the son of Giles and Nancy Roberts, who moved from Mecklenburg County, VA, to rural Ross County, OH, soon after his birth. The Robertses were neighbors of Madison Hemings and his family. A. J. Roberts attended Wilberforce and Oberlin colleges and taught school for fourteen years in Ohio and Tennessee. In 1878 he married Ellen Hemings. Nine years later, with two young children (Frederick and Estelle), they left their home and families in Ross County to settle in Los Angeles.
Working first as a drayman, A. J. Roberts and a friend soon built up what became the Los Angeles Van, Truck and Storage Company. In the early 1900s Roberts opened the first black-owned mortuary in Los Angeles, in which his sons Frederick M. Roberts and William Giles Roberts were also associated. He was a founder of Tabernacle Baptist Church, was active in the National Urban League, and was described in an obituary as “one of California’s most progressive pioneer citizens.”
Ann Pettiford Medley
Ann Pettiford Medley grew up in Greenfield, Ohio. She and her husband, Cecil Medley, raised five children and worked in the catering and food services field. It was her daughter Patti Jo Harding who began to research the family history and enlisted the help of her cousin Diana Redman and Getting Word consultant Beverly Gray. Mother and daughter were present at Getting Word’s first interview in Chillicothe in 1993. Ann Medley remembers Sunday visits to her grandmother Anna Young Pettiford, some of whose siblings passed into the white world, cutting ties with the family.
Annette Woodson Roberts
Mabel Hall Middleton
Mabel Hall Pittman Middleton, writer and teacher, grew up in Lexington, Virginia. After serving in the Women’s Army Corps in World War II and graduating from Fisk University, she taught English in Mississippi. She obtained her doctorate from Southern Illinois University and chaired the English Department at Jackson State University. She was appointed to the Mississippi Humanities Council in 2000.
Dr. Middleton, who married and had three children, heard from her family of her connection to Monticello but did not hear of her ancestor Brown Colbert’s emigration to Liberia.
Janie Trent Mosley
The Trent sisters—Janie Mosley, Omega Calimese, and Bertha Harmon—are descended from Betsy Hemmings through both their maternal and paternal lines. They heard the history of their connection to Monticello from their aunt Lucy Ann Trent, who was a teacher. Their grandparents, who purchased a Buckingham County farm in freedom, lost two of their sons in a West Virginia mine accident at the end of the nineteenth century. As Bertha Harmon said, they have a “strong willed, hard working, loving family,” a family that has always tried “to do the right thing, to try to help people that needed help and strive for the best.