By 1880 Mary Edmondson Franklin and her daughters Mary and Coralie were living in Harper’s Ferry, where the girls attended Storer College.
From Albemarle County, VA to Loudoun County, VA
In 1865 Wormley Hughes, grandson of Wormley Hughes of Monticello, left Albemarle County with Gen. Philip Sheridan’s Union army; he settled after the war in Loudoun County, and later in Fauquier County, where his descendants still live.
From Harper’s Ferry, WV to Washington, DC
In 1898 Coralie Franklin married George William Cook and moved to Washington, where she was a prominent lecturer and suffragist and member of the school board.
From Albemarle County, VA to Baltimore, MD
In the late 1880s Fountain Hughes, a descendant of Monticello’s head gardener Wormley Hughes, left Charlottesville for Baltimore, where he worked, like his ancestor, as a gardener and was interviewed in 1949. The resulting sound recording is one of very few of former slaves.
From Lexington, VA to Winchester, VA
By 1880 Brown Colbert‘s granddaughter Mary Edmondson Franklin had moved with her husband and daughters to Winchester.
From Chillicothe and Ross County, OH to Boston, MA
In 1868 and 1870 Ann-Elizabeth Fossett Isaacs‘s daughters Virginia and Maria married former Union army officers James M. Trotter and William H. Dupree and moved to live in Boston. Ann-Elizabeth‘s nephew Frederick Douglass Isaacs also went to Boston, in the early years of the twentieth century.
From Madison, WI to Chicago, IL
In the 1890s some of the grandsons of Eston Hemings Jefferson left Madison for Chicago, where they practiced law and medicine.
From Watseka, IL to Chicago, IL
About 1900 Mary Hemings Johnson’s daughter Nellie moved to Chicago with her husband, Henry Jones, who owned cabarets and jazz clubs on State Street.
From Chillicothe and Ross County, OH to Watseka, IL
About 1868 Madison Hemings‘s daughter Mary Hemings Johnson and her family left Ohio for Watseka, where her husband was a barber.
From Lexington, VA to Parkersburg, WV
After his service in the Union army in the Civil War, Brown Colbert‘s grandson George Edmondson settled in Parkersburg with his family.
In 1868 Sarah Woodson married Rev. Jordan W. Early; they lived in Nashville and other parts of Tennessee, where she assisted her husband in his missionary work.
From Madison, WI to Memphis, TN
In 1865, after three years in a Wisconsin regiment, Eston Hemings Jefferson‘s son Col. John Wayles Jefferson decided to settle in the rich cotton country he had seen during the war; he became one of the largest cotton brokers in Memphis.
From Cincinnati, OH to Oakland, CA
In 1872 Isabella Fossett’s daughter Josephine Powell moved with her husband, a Pullman porter, to Oakland, where their daughter Pauline Powell Burns became a well-known artist and musician.
From Boston, MA to Cincinnati, OH
By 1860 Isabella Fossett and her daughter were able to join her parents and siblings in Cincinnati.
From Chillicothe, OH to Cincinnati, OH
By 1842 Joseph Fossett and his family had settled in Cincinnati, where he pursued his trade as a blacksmith with his sons. His daughter Ann-Elizabeth Isaacs and her family soon returned to Charlottesville, which they left forever in 1850, moving first to the town of Chillicothe and then to a farm six miles east.
From Albemarle County, VA to Maysville, KY
In 1850 Dolly Cottrell and William Smith, who had been purchased at the 1827 Monticello sale by University of Virginia professor George Blaettermann, were taken to Kentucky by his widow.
From Albemarle County, VA to Cincinnati, OH
About 1845 Israel Gillette Jefferson and his wife left Charlottesville for Cincinnati, where he worked as a waiter on an Ohio River steamboat. After being purchased out of slavery in Virginia, Peter Fossett joined his family in Cincinnati in 1850; he became a prominent caterer and Baptist minister there.
From Cincinnati, OH to Pike County, OH
About 1857 Israel Gillette Jefferson and his wife left Cincinnati for Pike County, where they had a farm and were neighbors of Madison Hemings.
From Albemarle County, VA to Chillicothe, OH
In 1837 and 1838 three Monticello families left Virginia for Chillicothe: blacksmith Joseph Fossett and his family; his daughter Ann-Elizabeth Isaacs and her family; and her sister-in-law Julia Isaacs (Mrs. Eston) Hemings and her family. The Fossetts and Isaacses soon left (although the latter returned in 1850); Julia and Eston Hemings, who led a popular dance band, remained for a dozen years.
From Albemarle County, VA to Pike County, OH
About 1837 Madison Hemings, who had been freed in Jefferson’s will, left Charlottesville with his family for Pike County, Ohio. He worked as a carpenter in the county seat, Waverly, and eventually owned his own farm on the Pike-Ross county border.
From Chillicothe, OH to Jackson County, OH
In 1829 Thomas and Jemima Woodson purchased land and founded a very successful black farming settlement, at Berlin Crossroads. The whole family participated in the Underground Railroad.
From Greenbrier County, VA to Chillicothe, OH
About 1821, Thomas Woodson and his family left western Virginia for Chillicothe, where they participated in founding the first independent African Methodist Episcopal church west of the Alleghenies.
From Chillicothe, OH to Madison, WI
About 1852 Eston and Julia Hemings and their children left Ohio for Wisconsin, where they changed their name to Jefferson and thereafter lived as white people.
From Jackson County, OH to Pittsburgh, PA
In 1831 Thomas Woodson‘s son Lewis Woodson moved to Pittsburgh, where he started a school and was a minister.
From Albemarle County, VA to Boston, MA
By 1850 Isabella Fossett, who had escaped from slavery in Virginia with a free pass forged by her brother Peter, reached Boston with her daughter, Josephine.
From Lexington, VA to Monrovia, Liberia
In 1833 Brown Colbert made the courageous decision to become free, even though that meant leaving Virginia. He and part of his family sailed to Liberia on the west coast of Africa, only to die tragically within weeks of their arrival.
From Albemarle County, VA to Washington, DC
In the winter of 1821-1822 Harriet and Beverly Hemings were allowed to leave Monticello without pursuit. According to their brother Madison Hemings, they went to Washington, married, and vanished into white society.
From Eppington, VA to Washington, DC
In 1808 Melinda Colbert, who had married John Freeman, Jefferson’s dining-room servant in Washington, was freed. She joined her husband at the White House. They remained in Washington and raised a large family in freedom.
From Albemarle County, VA to Lexington, VA
In 1806 Brown Colbert left Monticello for Lexington with his new master, John Jordan. He had asked to be sold to prevent separation from his wife, Jordan’s slave.
From Eppington, VA to Millbrook, Buckingham County, VA
About 1811 Betsy Hemmings moved, with the widowed John Wayles Eppes to his plantation in Buckingham County, where she is buried.
From Albemarle County, VA to Eppington, Chesterfield County, VA
In 1797 Betsy Hemmings and Melinda Colbert left Monticello for a plantation ninety miles away; Jefferson had given them to his daughter Maria on her marriage to John Wayles Eppes.
From Albemarle County, VA to Petersburg, VA
In the 1820s, Isaac Granger became free and made his way to Petersburg, where he continued to practice his trade as a blacksmith. There he was known for his stories of Monticello, which were recorded in the 1840s, and he adopted the surname Jefferson.
From Albemarle County, VA to St. Charles County, MO
In 1836 Dolly Hughes, purchased at the 1827 Monticello sale by Samuel Henley, and her children (one named Wormley after her father) were taken to Missouri when Henley left Virginia for the west. She died there two years later.
From Albemarle County, VA to Courtland (Lawrence County), AL
In 1846 Susan and Reuben Scott were taken to Alabama by Jefferson’s great-grandson William S. Bankhead. Their descendants, interviewed for the Getting Word project, still live in Courtland.
From Albemarle County, VA to Arkansas Territory
In 1836 Martha Ann Colbert, daughter of Monticello butler Burwell Colbert, was taken by Jefferson’s grandson Meriwether Lewis Randolph to Arkansas Territory. Her fate is unknown.
1826 – 1865
After Thomas Jefferson’s death in 1826, the indebtedness of his estate compelled his executors to sell his books and furniture, house and land, and the people he had considered his property. At auction sales in 1827 and 1829, 130 men, women, and children were sold away from their home and families. Children as young as nine were sold separately from their parents. Although Jefferson’s granddaughter reported that only one slave was sold outside Virginia, even those who had new masters in Albemarle or adjacent counties could not count on remaining near their relatives.
In the forty years until Emancipation, most of Monticello’s African Americans remained in slavery, and many lived close to Monticello. Others left, either involuntarily or by choice. A stream of Virginians was moving westward to new pastures, taking their enslaved property with them. We probably know of only a fraction of them. William Smith was taken to Kentucky, Wormley Hughes’s daughters to Missouri and Mississippi, Martha Ann Colbert to Arkansas Territory, and Susan Scott to northern Alabama.
Seven people (all Hemings family members) were freed by the terms of Jefferson’s will or received unofficial freedom from his heirs. Others, among them Israel Gillette Jefferson and the children of Joseph Fossett, obtained their freedom by purchase. Almost all of these free people left the land of slavery in the 1830s and 1840s for the free state of Ohio. The Fossetts and Israel Jefferson chose to settle in Cincinnati, the nation’s largest inland metropolis, while Madison and Eston Hemings went to more rural Ross and Pike counties, where many free people of color from central Virginia had already settled.
At least two people made courageous gambles for freedom. Isabella Fossett ran away successfully to Boston, but Brown Colbert had to travel to a new continent with a dangerous climate to become a free man.
1865 – 1920
The dynamic arcs of travel illustrated on this map are signs of a new era. Before the Civil War, many of the relocations of Monticello’s African Americans and their descendants were enforced journeys made by still-enslaved people. Even those who were free, like the Hemingses and the Fossetts, were impelled to leave Virginia by the worsening conditions for free blacks there. From 1865, an expanding transportation network made travel easier and everyone was free, free to choose their residences, free to seek a better life for their families.
Moses Gillette left Virginia after Emancipation to settle in Ohio near his brother Israel Gillette Jefferson. Yet the search for greater opportunity led to separation as well as reunion. Several descendants left the Ohio heartland for cities on the East and West Coasts. Madison Hemings’s youngest daughter, Ellen Hemings Roberts, broke the pattern of her family members by leaving rural Ohio for a western city. Her enterprising husband, Andrew J. Roberts, prospered in the booming city of Los Angeles. Virginia and Maria Isaacs left their Ohio farm to live in Boston with their husbands, James Monroe Trotterand William H. Dupree, who had served in the 55th Massachusetts infantry regiment in the Civil War. As the only fully-commissioned black army officers in Boston, they were conspicuous figures with a broader choice of careers than most black men. They joined the U. S. Postal Service as clerks, pioneers in one of the few white-collar workplaces then open to African Americans.
Eston Hemings Jefferson’s son John Wayles Jefferson was so taken with the rich cotton plantations he had seen when fighting the Confederates in the war that he left his family in Wisconsin to live in Memphis, Tennessee. He became a very wealthy cotton broker and plantation owner there. His brother Beverly Jefferson’s sons and nephew migrated from Wisconsin to the fastest-growing city in the nation, Chicago, to pursue their careers in business, law, and medicine. One became a millionaire.
Present Day
The dots indicate the residences, at the time of their interviews, of nearly 180 people who participated in the Getting Word project. This map is not representative of the entire community of living descendants of Monticello’s African American community. If you wish to learn more about descendants in a particular place, you can enter a location in the Search box. Also, you can click on People and check the box to the left of the relevant family name.
In 1993, Lucia Stanton, the project director, and Dianne Swann-Wright, the project oral historian, began to trace the whereabouts of Monticello’s enslaved descendants, with the help of consultant Beverly Gray, a historian who had been studying the African American experience in southern Ohio for many years. The first event of the project was a reception that she organized in Chillicothe in 1993. Forty descendants of the Fossett and Hemings families attended.
Over the years more individuals came forward to share their stories. Staff traveled to Ohio many times and to Alabama twice; they visited the cities of Boston, Cincinnati, Columbus, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Oakland, Seattle, and Washington, DC, where they recorded interviews, explored cemeteries, examined family photographs and documents, and were enriched by shared memories. Research in newspapers, private papers, and public records supplemented the interviews.
