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Madison Hemings

Madison Hemings listed with his mother and siblings on Jefferson's bread ration list, Feb. 1810
Farm Book, page 134, Massachusetts Historical Society

Madison Hemings listed with his mother and siblings in Jefferson's Farm Book, Feb. 1810
Massachusetts Historical Society


Madison Hemings helped build the Emmitt House hotel, Waverly, OH

Madison Hemings helped build the Emmitt House hotel, Waverly, OH

Madison Hemings (1805-1877) was the second surviving son of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Madison Hemings learned the woodworking trade from his uncle John Hemmings. He became free in 1827, according to the terms of Thomas Jefferson’s will. Hemings and his brother Eston left Monticello to live with their mother, Sally Hemings, in the town of Charlottesville. Together they purchased a lot and built a two-story brick and wood house.
In 1831, Madison Hemings married a free woman of color, Mary McCoy. In the late 1830s the Hemingses left Virginia for a rural community in southern Ohio, where Mary Hemings’s family was already settled. Madison Hemings helped build several structures in the notoriously anti-black town of Waverly. He gradually accumulated property and, by 1865, he and his family were living on their sixty-six-acre farm in Ross County. Madison and Mary Hemings raised nine children. When his recollections were recorded in 1873, he gave his history in a matter-of-fact manner, referring to Jefferson as his father a number of times. His reputation as a man of his word survived in the family of white neighbors to the present day.
- Elizabeth Hemings 1735–1807 John Wayles 1715–1773
- Sally Hemings 1773–1835
- Madison Hemings 1805–1877
- Elizabeth Hemings grandmother
- Mary McCoy Hemings wife
- Sally Hemings mother
- Eston Hemings Jefferson brother
- Ellen Hemings Roberts daughter
- Shay Banks-Young descendent