Hemings
George Edmondson
Born in slavery in Lexington, Virginia, George Edmondson claimed his freedom in June 1864, when Union forces occupied the town. He evidently accompanied the army across the mountains into West Virginia after its defeat at Lynchburg a week later. He enlisted in the 45th regiment (later the 127th) of the U. S. Colored Infantry in Wheeling and took part in months of grueling trench warfare during the siege of Richmond and Petersburg. He was wounded, promoted to corporal, and was with the first Union troops to enter Petersburg. At war’s end, Edmondson was shipped with the rest of the all-black 25th Corps to the remote coast of Texas.
After his discharge, Edmondson returned to West Virginia, settling in Parkersburg with his wife, Maria McDowell, and their children. He worked in a foundry and glass works and soon owned his own home. A trustee of his Methodist church, he sent one of his sons to Wilberforce University. His obituary described him as “one of the leading citizens of Parkersburg of the older generation.”
Reid Colbert
Coralie Franklin Cook
Coralie Franklin Cook, Brown Colbert’s great-granddaughter, was born in slavery and became the first descendant of a Monticello slave known to have graduated from college. She was born in Lexington, VA, to Albert and Mary Elizabeth Edmondson Franklin (1829-1917). In 1880, Coralie Franklin graduated from Storer College in Harpers Ferry, WV. From this time, she was widely noted as a powerful public speaker. She taught elocution and English at Storer and then at Howard University.
In 1898 she married George William Cook (1855-1931), a Howard University professor and trustee. Coralie Cook served for twelve years as a member of the District of Columbia Board of Education. She was a founder of the National Association of Colored Women and a committed suffragist. About 1910, the Cooks became followers of the Baha’i faith. A longtime friend and admirer of Susan B. Anthony, she eventually became disillusioned by the women’s suffrage movement, feeling it had “turned its back on the woman of color.”
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.”
William Dalton
Shay Banks-Young
Shay Banks-Young was a radio and TV personality and poet in Columbus, Ohio. After genetic testing in 1998 established a connection between Madison Hemings’s brother Eston and Thomas Jefferson, she went on the Oprah Winfrey show and met Eston’s descendant Julia Jefferson Westerinen. Following that encounter, Banks-Young and Westerinen brought a discussion of racial issues, titled “A Conversation in Black and White,” to audiences around the country.
Mary Hemings Bell
Mary Hemings was Elizabeth Hemings’s oldest child. After the 1774 division of the estate of Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, she was brought with her family to Monticello, where she was a valued household servant. She had six children, the two youngest with white merchant Thomas Bell, who became her common-law husband. Bell purchased Mary Hemings and their children, Robert and Sarah, freed them, and bequeathed them his considerable property.
Jefferson was unwilling to sell Mary Hemings Bell’s older children, Joseph Fossett and Betsy Hemmings, who remained in slavery at Monticello. After Thomas Bell’s death in 1800, Mary—described in one court document as his “relict & widow”—lived with her children and grandchildren in a house on Charlottesville’s main street. She maintained close ties with her still-enslaved relations at Monticello. Her free status and property helped her son Joseph Fossett minimize the fragmenting of his family at the Monticello dispersal sale in 1827.
Edwana Jackson Bennett
Colby Boggs
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.