Hemings

Ethel Hughes Bolden

Posted on December 9, 2022 by -

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.”

Betty Brown

Posted on December 9, 2022 by -

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.

Pauline Powell Burns

Posted on December 9, 2022 by -

Pauline Powell Burns, a great-granddaughter of Joseph and Edith Fossett, was born and raised in Oakland, California.  Her grandmother, Isabella Fossett, was sold away from Monticello and her family at the age of eight, but succeeded in escaping to Boston in the 1840s, using a free pass forged by her brother Peter Fossett.  Always at risk of re-enslavement because of the Fugitive Slave Act, Isabella joined the rest of her family in Cincinnati by 1860. 

After Isabella’s death in 1872, her daughter, Josephine Turner, moved to Oakland with her husband, William W. Powell, a porter on the new transcontinental railroad.  Their daughter Pauline demonstrated artistic and musical talent at a young age and pursued years of study of both painting and piano.  She gave numerous public recitals in the Bay Area and was hailed as “the bright musical star of her state.” An exhibit of her paintings in 1890 was said to be the first by an African-American artist in California.  She and her husband, Edward E. Burns, both cultural leaders in their community, left no descendants.

Lessie Young Clay

Posted on December 9, 2022 by -

Lessie Young was the great-granddaughter of Reuben and Susan Scott, enslaved foreman and domestic servant brought to northern Alabama by Jefferson’s great-grandson William Stuart Bankhead in 1846.  She, like her ancestors, worked for Jefferson’s descendants and, for many years, was cook for Bankhead’s granddaughter Miss Cary Hotchkiss.  Her husband, Elbert Clay, was farm foreman.  Bankhead descendants preserved Lessie Clay’s recipes, heard her talk of her ancestors at Monticello, and recorded her memories in a joint interview with Miss Cary in 1971.

Brown Colbert

Posted on December 9, 2022 by -

Brown Colbert lived his first twenty years at Monticello, where he worked as an enslaved domestic servant and a nailmaker.  In 1805, he asked to be sold to a free workman leaving Monticello, so that he and his wife would not be separated.  Jefferson reluctantly agreed and the Colberts lived in slavery in Lexington, Virginia, until 1833, when they took a momentous step.

In exchange for freedom, they agreed to leave Virginia for a new colony in Africa. Colbert, his wife, Mary, and their two youngest sons boarded a ship for Liberia, leaving behind three grown children who could not be freed.  Tragically, only one of the family, eight-year-old Burwell, survived the first weeks in the new land of freedom.  He may have lived to see Liberia become Africa’s first independent republic in 1847.

Descendants of Colbert left behind in Virginia include a Union Army soldier, teachers and university professors, and a well-known lecturer and suffragist.  The story of their ancestors’ courageous gamble for freedom was evidently not passed down orally but it survived in a family Bible.

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