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In 1998, the pastor and several members of Cumminsville Baptist Church in Cincinnati generously shared what they had heard about the founder of their church. The Rev. Peter Fossett’s presence is still vivid a century after his death.  His photograph is in the vestibule of the church building, to which the congregation moved because of construction of an interstate highway. The Rev. George Southerland, Martha Fletcher, and Edna and Lucius Roberts spoke of what they heard of Reverend Fossett’s generosity, his accomplishments, and the respect in which he was held across the whole city of Cincinnati.

Edna and Lucius Roberts, members of Cumminsville Baptist Church in Cincinnati, shared what they had heard about the church’s founding minister, Rev. Peter Fossett.

Edna and Lucius Roberts, members of Cumminsville Baptist Church in Cincinnati, shared what they had heard about the church’s founding minister, Rev. Peter Fossett.

According to oral history, Henry Martin, whose parents have not been identified, was born at Monticello; Jefferson, he said, was his father. Enslaved until 1865, he was a waiter at a University of Virginia student boardinghouse and worked in hospitals for wounded Confederate soldiers during the Civil War.

Generations of University students after the war knew Henry Martin as the man who rang the bell that roused them in the morning and called them to lectures throughout the day. As head janitor, he was responsible for the lecture rooms, library, and chapel, and he rang the Rotunda bell every day for four decades. “I’ve been as true to that bell as to my God,” he is reported to have said. An imposing figure over six feet tall, Martin was described in many accounts as a man of “quiet humor,” “true dignity,” and “intelligence, firmness and diligence.”

He had three wives and more than twenty children, was a deacon in his Baptist church and, although not literate himself, made sure his children were.

Cousins Cary Hotchkiss II and Roger McWhorter are descendants of Thomas Jefferson’s eldest granddaughter Anne Randolph Bankhead through her son, William Stuart Bankhead.  Among the slaves Bankhead brought with him to Alabama in 1846 was Susan Scott.  For the past century and a half the lives of the Scott and Bankhead families have been intertwined. 

Cary Hotchkiss is retired from farming.  Roger McWhorter left banking for farming: cotton at first and then cattle.  They both have vivid memories of spending time at the home of their relative Miss Cary Hotchkiss (1887–1978), where Lessie Young Clay, Susan Scott’s great-granddaughter, was cook.  And playing baseball with Lessie Clay’s brothers and nephews.

Both agreed that the Scott descendants are like family to them.  As Hotchkiss said, “I don’t know who had the biggest hold on whom.”

Ray Malone was a software developer, after a career in broadcasting, and owner of radio stations.  His ancestors, of Irish origin, arrived in the Chillicothe, OH, area in the early nineteenth century and were farmers in Ross County.  From his uncle and grandfather, Malone heard stories about Madison Hemings that had come through his great-great-uncle Benjamin Malone, Hemings’s neighbor.

Cousins Cary Hotchkiss II and Roger McWhorter are descendants of Thomas Jefferson’s eldest granddaughter Anne Randolph Bankhead through her son, William Stuart Bankhead.  Among the slaves Bankhead brought with him to Alabama in 1846 was Susan Scott.  For the past century and a half the lives of the Scott and Bankhead families have been intertwined. 

Cary Hotchkiss is retired from farming.  Roger McWhorter left banking for farming: cotton at first and then cattle.  They both have vivid memories of spending time at the home of their relative Miss Cary Hotchkiss (1887–1978), where Lessie Young Clay, Susan Scott’s great-granddaughter, was cook.  And playing baseball with Lessie Clay’s brothers and nephews.

Both agreed that the Scott descendants are like family to them.  As Hotchkiss said, “I don’t know who had the biggest hold on whom.”

Vincent Hughes grew up in Keswick, just east of Charlottesville, where his family attended the church founded by members of the Hughes and Hern families of Monticello, Union Run.  He remembers being baptized in the Rivanna River.  He spent twenty-six years in the Air Force before becoming an exhibit fabricator at the Washington State Capitol Museum.  Since retiring in 1996, Hughes has returned to Virginia every summer to visit family and friends and to do further family research.  His exact connection to Wormley and Ursula Hughes of Monticello remains elusive.