Families
Beverly Frederick Jefferson
Beverly Jefferson, the youngest child of Eston Hemings and Julia Isaacs Jefferson, lived as an African American in southern Ohio until the age of eleven, when his family moved to Madison, Wisconsin, changed their surname from Hemings to Jefferson, and thereafter lived as white people. Until 1872 Beverly Jefferson worked in the hotel business, becoming a very popular hotel proprietor after the Civil War. Thereafter he focused on what became the Jefferson Transfer Company, the leading carriage and omnibus firm in the capital. Long obituaries followed the death of this “well known and prominent citizen of Madison.”
Beverly Jefferson and his wife, Anna Maud Smith, had five sons, who included graduates of the University of Wisconsin, a lawyer, and a physician. He apparently spoke of his descent from Thomas Jefferson only to close friends. Long after his death, his grandsons altered the family history to erase the connection to the Hemings family. Present-day descendants had no knowledge of their African American heritage until the 1970s.
Eston Hemings Jefferson
Eston Hemings was the youngest son of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Eston Hemings learned the woodworking trade from his uncle, John Hemmings, and became free in 1829, according to the terms of Thomas Jefferson’s will. He and his brother Madison left Monticello to live in the town of Charlottesville with their mother, Sally Hemings. Together they purchased a lot and built a two-story brick and wood house.
In 1832, Eston Hemings married a free woman of color, Julia Ann Isaacs. About 1838 they sold their property and moved to Chillicothe, OH, where Hemings led a very successful dance band. He was remembered as “a master of the violin, and an accomplished ‘caller’ of dances.”
At mid-century Eston and Julia Hemings and their three children, John Wayles, Anna, and Beverly, left Ohio for Wisconsin, changing their surname to Jefferson and living henceforth as white people. They settled in the capital, Madison, where Eston Jefferson pursued his trade as a cabinetmaker. A 1998 study genetically linked his male descendants with male descendants of the Jefferson family.
Isaac Granger Jefferson
Isaac Jefferson’s father, George Granger, was the only enslaved man to serve as Monticello overseer, while his mother, Ursula Granger, was a particularly trusted household servant. Trained in metalworking, including apprenticeship to a Philadelphia tinner, Isaac Granger worked in the Monticello blacksmith shop and nail factory, and briefly operated a tin shop.
He, his wife, Iris, and their sons Squire and Joyce became the property of Jefferson’s son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph in the late 1790s. In the 1820s Granger gained his freedom and moved to Petersburg, VA, where he practiced his trade as a blacksmith until his death.
Isaac Granger, who adopted the surname Jefferson toward the end of his life, was known in Petersburg for his stories of life at Monticello. His vivid recollections were taken down by Charles Campbell in the 1840s, but not published until 1951, along with a striking daguerreotype of the blacksmith. Campbell noted that Isaac Jefferson “bore a good character.”
Israel Gillette Jefferson
Israel Gillette Jefferson, the son of Edward and Jane Gillette, worked as a boy in the Monticello house, the kitchen, and the textile shop. From age thirteen, he was also a postilion, riding one of the four horses that pulled Jefferson’s landau carriage. He was sold after Jefferson’s death to Thomas Walker Gilmer, who became Secretary of the Navy. The earnings of his second wife, a free seamstress, Elizabeth Farrow Randolph, helped him purchase his freedom from Gilmer.
- Podcast: The Life of Israel Gillette Jefferson (12/4/2020)
At the suggestion of the clerk who wrote out his free papers in 1844, he adopted the surname Jefferson. He and his wife then moved to Ohio, where he first worked as a waiter on an Ohio River steamboat and then bought a farm in Pike County. The Jeffersons were active members of Eden Baptist Church, where Israel Jefferson was deacon and treasurer.
In 1873 Israel Jefferson’s recollections of his life at Monticello and in Ohio were published in a Pike County newspaper.
J. Calvin Jefferson
Calvin Jefferson, who is descended from the Grangers as well as the Hemingses of Monticello, grew up in Washington, DC. After working for the U. S. Postal Service, he became an archivist for the National Archives and Records Administration, from which he retired in 2007 after thirty years. He did not learn of his family’s connection to Monticello until 1996. He has a strong interest in his family history and continues research on the Hemings family, particularly Betty Brown and her descendants.
John Wayles Jefferson
John Wayles Jefferson, the oldest child of Eston Hemings and Julia Isaacs Jefferson, lived as an African American in southern Ohio until the age of fifteen, when his family moved to Madison, Wisconsin, changed their surname from Hemings to Jefferson, and thereafter lived as white people. He operated a restaurant and the city’s oldest hotel until the Civil War, when he joined the 8th Wisconsin infantry regiment as its major. Over three years of arduous campaigns in Mississippi and Louisiana he rose to the rank of colonel, at one time commanding the whole regiment. When he encountered an acquaintance from his Ohio years, he begged him “not to tell the fact that he had colored blood in his veins, which he said was not suspected by any of his command.”
After the war, John Wayles Jefferson settled in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was a prominent citizen, plantation owner, and wealthy cotton broker. He never married and died in Memphis, described in an obituary as “a model man.”
Julia Isaacs Jefferson
Julia Ann Isaacs, daughter of German Jewish merchant David Isaacs and Nancy West, a free woman of color, lived with her family on Charlottesville’s main street until 1832, when she married Eston Hemings. About 1838 they moved to Chillicothe in southern Ohio, where Hemings led a popular dance band.
At mid-century the Hemingses made a fateful decision. They and their three children, John Wayles, Anna, and Beverly, left Ohio for Madison, Wisconsin, changing their surname to Jefferson and living henceforth as white people. Julia Jefferson an active member of the Congregational church and, in the Civil War, the Ladies Aid Society. Her sons and grandsons, whom she helped raise, prospered in society, business, and the professions. Many years after her death she was still remembered in her family as “its best and bravest character.”
Mary Jefferson
Jeniece Johnson
John Q. T. King
John Quill Taylor King was born in Memphis, Tennessee, the son of Alice Woodson, a teacher, and John Quill Taylor, a doctor. When his mother remarried after his father’s death, he took the surname of his stepfather, Charles King, a funeral director. King graduated from Fisk University in 1941 and then entered the U.S. Army. He retired from the Army Reserves as a Major General.
General King, who had numerous degrees, taught mathematics at Huston-Tillotson College in Austin, Texas, and served as its longest-standing president from 1965 to 1988. In retirement he ran the family mortuary. He and his wife, Marcet Alice Hines, also a college teacher, had three children, two of whom became physicians. General King admired his great-aunt, Minerva Jane Woodson, a teacher who was his main source for much of the Woodson family history. As he said, when explaining the Woodson urge to excel, “Failure was not a word in our family.”
Nancy Lee
Nancy Harriet Lee, daughter of Mary Elizabeth Butler and Thomas F. Lee, was raised in Bloomingburg, OH. She attended the University of Pittsburgh, intending to be a teacher, but could not fulfill her requirement as a practice teacher because of racial quotas. After this “shocking experience,” she turned instead to social work, ultimately obtaining a master’s degree. She rose high in the Juvenile and the Domestic Relations court systems in Pittsburgh, becoming the first black supervisor in the former. She received numerous community awards and led the drive to fund Pitt’s African Heritage Classroom. She was inspired by Mary McLeod Bethune’s principle, “Each one help one” and once said, “That’s the way we always were as a family, helping each other.”