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. Lloyd Hughes, known as Peter, attended the University of Maryland and works for the Coca-Cola company.
Hemings
Lloyd Hughes, Sr.
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.
Lloyd Hughes, a lifelong resident of Fauquier County, VA, served in the U. S. Army in World War II and afterward worked as a carpenter and cook. He was proud of how his daughter Karen White’s research made the connection to Monticello and recalled his father, John Henry Hughes, who worked with horses and as a gardener, as did his Monticello ancestor: “Gardening, it all comes back to that, yard and gardening.”
Timothy Hughes
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.
Timothy Hughes was excited to learn of the minister in his family tree, since he was studying at Washington Bible College at the time and he bears a striking resemblance to Reverend Hughes. He recalled his conversations with his grandfather John Henry Hughes about a wide range of topics.
Warren Hughes
Wormley Hughes
Wormley Hughes was the oldest son of Betty Brown; his father has not been identified. As a boy, he worked in the Monticello house and the Mulberry Row nailery. He became head gardener, preparing flower beds and planting seeds, bulbs, and trees. He also had charge of the valuable carriage and saddle horses in the Monticello stables. He dug the grave of his master, who had called him “one of the most trusty servants I have.
Wormley Hughes and his wife, Ursula Granger, a niece of Isaac Granger Jefferson, had twelve children. Hughes was informally freed by Jefferson’s daughter Martha Randolph, while the rest of his family was sold at the 1827 dispersal sale. Ursula and some of their children were acquired by the Randolphs, for whom Hughes continued to work. The Randolphs long remembered one of his expressions: “I am in no wise discouraged.” Wormley and Ursula Hughes’s descendants include several ministers, as well as farmers, gardeners, blacksmiths, teachers, and archivists.
Ann-Elizabeth Fossett Isaacs
Ann-Elizabeth Fossett was the daughter of Joseph Fossett, an enslaved blacksmith, and Edith Hern Fossett, an enslaved cook at Monticello. While her father was freed in Jefferson’s will, Ann-Elizabeth, her mother, and six of her siblings were sold in the 1827 dispersal sale. Through her family’s efforts, Ann-Elizabeth gained her freedom in 1837 and moved with her parents, her husband, Tucker Isaacs, and their children to Ohio. The Isaacs family remained in Ohio only a few years, returning to Charlottesville, where a number of their family members remained, some still in slavery.
In 1850, Ann-Elizabeth Isaacs and her family returned to Ohio, settling on a 158-acre farm in Ross County. Their home is still remembered as a station on the Underground Railroad and their descendants—most notably William Monroe Trotter—continued the fight for freedom and racial equality. As descendant Virginia Craft Rose said in her interview, “Whatever you feel strongly about, fight for it because that’s part of your heritage.”
Brian Isaacs
Elizabeth Hemings
The majority of those interviewed for the Getting Word project trace their ancestry to Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings. According to her grandson Madison Hemings, she was the daughter of an English sea captain named Hemings and an enslaved woman. She came with her children to Monticello about 1775, part of the inheritance from John Wayles, Jefferson’s father-in-law. There she was a valued domestic servant. Over seventy-five of her descendants lived and worked at Monticello as butlers, seamstresses, weavers, carpenters, blacksmiths, gardeners, and musicians.
Elizabeth Hemings had twelve known children. According to Madison Hemings, six of them were fathered by Wayles (Robert, James, Thenia, Critta, Peter, and Sally). All of the men and women freed by Jefferson (either officially or unofficially) were her children or grandchildren. Oral histories passed through many generations of the descendants of her daughters Mary Hemings Bell, Betty Brown, and Sally Hemings include the tradition of descent from Jefferson.
Madison Hemings
Madison Hemings (1805-1877) was the second surviving son of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Madison Hemings learned the woodworking trade from his uncle John Hemmings. He became free in 1827, according to the terms of Thomas Jefferson’s will. Hemings and his brother Eston left Monticello to live with their mother, Sally Hemings, in the town of Charlottesville. Together they purchased a lot and built a two-story brick and wood house.
In 1831, Madison Hemings married a free woman of color, Mary McCoy. In the late 1830s the Hemingses left Virginia for a rural community in southern Ohio, where Mary Hemings’s family was already settled. Madison Hemings helped build several structures in the notoriously anti-black town of Waverly. He gradually accumulated property and, by 1865, he and his family were living on their sixty-six-acre farm in Ross County. Madison and Mary Hemings raised nine children. When his recollections were recorded in 1873, he gave his history in a matter-of-fact manner, referring to Jefferson as his father a number of times. His reputation as a man of his word survived in the family of white neighbors to the present day.
Mary McCoy Hemings
Madison Hemings’s wife, Mary, was born into a mixed-race family of free blacks who lived near Monticello. Her mother was Eliza Hughes McCoy, daughter of a white landowner, Stephen Hughes, and his slave Chana (Chaney), whom he freed in 1798. Mary McCoy and Madison Hemings married in 1831 and lived with his mother, Sally Hemings, in a house on the main road west of Charlottesville.
After Sally Hemings’s death, the Hemingses sold their house and left for southern Ohio, settling on the border of Ross and Pike counties. They joined a rural community populated by many other mixed-race families from Albemarle County, including Mary McCoy Hemings’s own extended family, some of whom were involved in the Underground Railroad.
Mary and Madison Hemings raised nine children and spent their last years on their sixty-six-acre farm in Ross County.
Clara Lee Fisher
Clara Fisher, artist and counselor for a non-profit social service agency, is the mother of two boys and a graduate of Duquesne University. Her father, Edward James Lee, died when she was only eight. She remembers helping him in his vegetable garden and accompanying him on his rounds as a constable, serving subpoenas. She said, “My father always told me that Thomas Jefferson was his great-great-grandfather.” She is thus only four generations removed from Madison Hemings of Monticello. In 2009, a letter she wrote to Jefferson on the occasion of Barack Obama’s inauguration was published in Newsweek magazine.
Joseph Fossett
Monticello blacksmith Joseph Fossett, freed by Jefferson in his will, had to struggle to reunite his family after they were sold at the dispersal sale in 1827. With the support of his free relatives, including his mother, Mary Hemings Bell, he had achieved the freedom of his wife, Edith Hern Fossett, and five of their ten children by 1837. They then moved to Ohio, settling in Cincinnati by 1843.In this thriving city on the dividing line between slavery and freedom, the Fossetts did not turn their backs on those still in bondage. Joseph Fossett and his sons William, Daniel, and Jesse pursued the blacksmithing trade and the whole family actively participated in helping fugitive slaves traveling the Underground Railroad. Almost all of the Fossett children reached Ohio before their parents’ deaths. It took until 1850 in the case of their son Peter Fossett, who became a renowned minister.
Joseph and Edith Fossett’s descendants include artists, attorneys, caterers, civil servants, and musicians. In every generation Fossetts fought for freedom and equality, the most famous among them being William Monroe Trotter.