Discovering More About the Hughes Family
Monticello’s head gardener Wormley Hughes and his wife Ursula lived out their lives in slavery, but at least three of their eleven children—George, Robert, and Burwell Hughes—were at the Edgehill plantation in Albemarle County to greet the news of Lee's surrender in the first weeks of April 1865. George Hughes was a foreman of laborers and Robert Hughes was the plantation blacksmith. Their wives, Sarah Jane and Sidney Evans (a granddaughter of Jefferson’s longtime personal servant and coachman Jupiter and his wife Suck), were house servants for the Randolphs.
Records reveal that George and Sarah Jane Hughes did not accept a new form of subservience in making the transition from slavery to freedom. Hughes did not become discouraged by the failure of politicians to provide the freedmen with the often-quoted ‘forty acres.’ Over eight years he persisted in his efforts to cement the bonds of family and community and acquired over fifty acres of land, starting with a single acre, a piece of Edgehill itself. He and six other men, deacons of the Baptist church where his brother Robert was the pastor, signed the deed of gift of Thomas J. Randolph in November 1867. On this plot of land they began to build a church and schoolhouse for the Union Run congregation that flourishes today. This significant beginning was made in a time of turmoil. Only three weeks earlier the Edgehill freedmen had cast their votes in a political contest for the very first time, selecting representatives for the Virginia constitutional convention.
Exactly three years later George Hughes stood in the courthouse yard in Charlottesville, with his friend Lewis Hern, grandson of Monticello slaves David and Isabel Hern, and together they made a successful bid for one hundred acres of Albemarle County farmland. It took five years to pay for, with several members of the family contributing. One day in 1871, George Hughes and his wife both confronted the Randolphs with requests for higher wages. Sarah Jane Hughes was “very firm” in her insistence that their daughter Harriet receive higher monthly wages for her house work. And the demands of George Hughes, who had become the Edgehill farm manager, made Thomas J. Randolph rise “in his wrath” and threaten to fire him. It is not yet known if the family remained at Edgehill, but George Hughes and Lewis Hern kept up the payments and the land became theirs in 1875. Hughes and Hern descendants still live on the property today.