Woodson

Born in Greenbrier County, Virginia, Lewis Woodson moved with his family to Chillicothe, Ohio, about 1821.  He became a teacher and a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church.  In 1831 Woodson, his wife, Caroline Robinson, and their children relocated to Pittsburgh, where he started the first school for black children in the city and worked as a barber.

A trustee of Wilberforce University in Xenia, Ohio, Woodson was instrumental in its founding in 1863 as the first college owned and operated by African Americans.  He was a dedicated abolitionist, active in the Underground Railroad.  His newspaper writings forcefully advocated separate and independent institutions, like churches, schools, and communities, for African Americans, leading one author to call him the “Father of Black Nationalism.”

Thomas and Jemima Woodson and their family left Greenbrier County, Virginia, for Chillicothe, Ohio, about 1821.  There they participated in founding Quinn Chapel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, the first independent African American church west of the Alleghenies.  In 1829 Woodson started a community of “very independent people” in rural Jackson County.  By 1840 he owned 372 acres in a thriving settlement of nearly two hundred African Americans. One newspaper writer described the Woodsons as the most “intelligent, enterprising, farming family” in Ohio.

Of the Woodsons’ eleven children, three were ministers and five were teachers.  Two of their sons were killed for assisting fugitive slaves in the Underground Railroad.  Their descendants include many leaders in the fields of education, religion, law, and business.  Descendants of at least five of Thomas Woodson’s children carry the enduring family tradition that he was the son of Thomas Jefferson.

Paternity of Thomas Woodson

Read a Monticello Research Report on the issue of Woodson’s possible connection to Jefferson and Monticello.

Twins Robert and Ronald Smith first learned of their connection to the Woodson family after the death of their father, Karl Franklin Smith, an educator, Bible scholar, and bishop of the Church of Christ, Apostolic Faith, in Columbus.  In the 1930s Bishop Smith, who they remember as “very quiet in terms of his family history,” had drawn up an ancestry chart based on what he had heard from his mother, but he had never spoken about it.  Bishop Smith, who had a far-reaching radio ministry, founded his church and led it for a half century, from a congregation of twenty to over fifteen hundred.  Both the bishop’s parents were Methodist ministers.  As Robert Smith said about his ancestor Thomas Woodson, “The key has got to be his religion.”

Twins Robert and Ronald Smith first learned of their connection to the Woodson family after the death of their father, Karl Franklin Smith, an educator, Bible scholar, and bishop of the Church of Christ, Apostolic Faith, in Columbus.  In the 1930s Bishop Smith, who they remember as “very quiet in terms of his family history,” had drawn up an ancestry chart based on what he had heard from his mother, but he had never spoken about it.  Bishop Smith, who had a far-reaching radio ministry, founded his church and led it for a half century, from a congregation of twenty to over fifteen hundred.  Both the bishop’s parents were Methodist ministers.  As Robert Smith said about his ancestor Thomas Woodson, “The key has got to be his religion.”

James Wiley, a Tuskegee Airman, received a degree in physics from the University of Pittsburgh and wanted to be a scientist, but because of his race could only get a job as a chauffeur.  He obtained his pilot’s license and went to the Tuskegee Institute, a “paradise,” as an instructor.  After enlisting in 1942, he served in the famed 99th Pursuit Squadron of the Army Air Force, flew more than a hundred missions over southern Europe, and was awarded the Air Medal.  In 1965, Colonel Wiley retired from “a wonderful military career” and then worked for fifteen years as a customer engineer with the Boeing Company.  He and his wife, Ruby, raised three children.

John Quill Taylor King was born in Memphis, Tennessee, the son of Alice Woodson, a teacher, and John Quill Taylor, a doctor.  When his mother remarried after his father’s death, he took the surname of his stepfather, Charles King, a funeral director.  King graduated from Fisk University in 1941 and then entered the  U.S. Army.  He retired from the Army Reserves as a Major General. 

General King, who had numerous degrees, taught mathematics at Huston-Tillotson College in Austin, Texas, and served as its longest-standing president from 1965 to 1988.   In retirement he ran the family mortuary.  He and his wife, Marcet Alice Hines, also a college teacher, had three children, two of whom became physicians.  General King admired his great-aunt, Minerva Jane Woodson, a teacher who was his main source for much of the Woodson family history.  As he said, when explaining the Woodson urge to excel, “Failure was not a word in our family.” 

When Mary Kearney was seven, her father, G. Victor Cassells, called her and her siblings into the living room and showed them a small, leather-bound photo album.  He said, “I want you children to know who your ancestors are,” and told them that Thomas Jefferson was their third great-grandfather.  The treasured album, which came through her grandfather Cyrus Craton Cassells, a Civil War veteran, now belongs to Mrs. Kearney.

She married James A. Kearney and raised six children, writes poetry, and worked as a personnel security specialist for the Department of Defense for seventeen years.  An avid historian of the Woodson family, she gave to Monticello an ingenious piece of her father’s woodworking: a chain carved from a single piece of walnut.