Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
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. Their ancestor was Reverend Hughes’s son, also Wormley Hughes (1851-1901), who left Albemarle County with the Union army in the confusion at the end of the Civil War; his parents were “broken hearted.”
The research of Karen Hughes White, an archivist and founder of the Afro-American Historical Association of Fauquier County, was the key to making her family’s connection to the Hughes, Granger, and Hemings families of Monticello. At the Getting Word Gathering in 1997, Karen’s extended family members said that, thanks to her, they were “overwhelmed with joy” to be brought together in the place of their ancestors.
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
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.
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
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.”
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
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.
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
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.
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
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.
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Gloria Roberts, daughter of Pearl Hinds and Frederick Madison Roberts, graduated from the University of Southern California and studied at the Juilliard School of Music. She lived most of her life in Europe, where she pursued a career as a concert pianist and accompanist, specializing in African American spirituals and the music of George Gershwin as well as European classical composers. She lived as a child in the household of her grandmother Ellen Hemings Roberts and remembers her well.
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Patricia Roberts, daughter of Pearl Hinds and Frederick Madison Roberts, attended business school at St. Louis University and returned to live in Los Angeles. After years in business and as an executive secretary and insurance agent, she took great pleasure in retirement as a teacher of young children.
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
Pearl Hinds Roberts was the daughter of Lucy McKinney and Wiley Hinds, a former slave who left Arkansas in 1858 for the Central Valley of California. The Hinds family divided its time between Oakland and their large cattle ranch in Tulare County. Pearl Hinds studied music at the Boston Conservatory and Oberlin College, as well as with Fossett descendant Pauline Powell Burns in Oakland. For a time she headed the music department at what is now South Carolina State University.
In 1921 she married Frederick Madison Roberts, then a member of the California legislature. They lived in Los Angeles, where continued her musical career as organist and choir director in various churches. From 1942, she worked in retail—the first black salesperson in a downtown department store. Her watchword was, “If you have ideals, hang on to them despite disappointments.”
Posted on December 9, 2022 by refresh -
