Hemings

William Cunningham

William Cunningham, who worked for many years for the Meade Corporation, was living at the time of his interview in the house in which he was born, across the street from the house lived in by his great-grandparents Tucker and Ann-Elizabeth Isaacs.  He participated in the Getting Word project to honor his mother, Ann Elizabeth Isaacs Cunningham, who attended Boston Music School and was a church organist.  He and his wife, Mae Catherine Wingo, raised six children.  When asked how he felt about Thomas Jefferson, he replied “I would like to know more about Mary Hemings than hear all the talk about him.”

Ellen Craft Dammond

Ellen Dammond, who was a social worker and personnel supervisor, was descended from both the Fossetts of Monticello and the famous fugitive slaves William and Ellen Craft. The prominent equal rights activist William Monroe Trotter was her uncle. She felt strongly about preserving and passing on the history of the struggles for freedom and equality, and introduced a 1970s film on the Crafts. Both she and her daughter, Peggy Preacely, were active participants in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Ellen Dammond worked with Dorothy Height and Polly Cowan in the Wednesdays in Mississippi project. The 2006 Getting Word interview includes a 1995 recording of Ellen Dammond and her sister, Virginia Craft Rose, remembering their family and its history.

The William and Ellen Craft Story

Find out about the Craft ancestors, William and Ellen, an enslaved couple from Macon, Georgia, who made a daring escape to freedom.

Angela Hughes Davidson

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.

Like the other members of the Hughes family with whom she was interviewed in 1996, Angela Hughes Davidson only recently discovered her family’s connection to Monticello through her ancestor Wormley Hughes. Angela was born in Washington, D.C. and graduated from Howard University.

Ethel Hughes Bolden

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

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

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.