Existing comment:
Wormley and Ursula's sons George and Robert Hughes were, respectively, head man and blacksmith at Thomas Jefferson Randolph's Edgehill plantation. After the Civil War, the Hughes brothers -- along with Lewis Hern, a great-grandson of David and Isabel Hern -- founded Union Run Baptist Church, which thrives today in the same location in Keswick, Virginia, near Monticello. Robert Hughes was its first minister and officiated at many marriages of descendants of the Monticello enslaved community.
The Hughes brothers and Hern purchased land shortly after the War. Interviews with Hern descendants reveal the significance of land ownership in creating a sanctuary for freed people, the family emphasis on the importance of education and the difficulties surmounted to obtain it, and how Hughes and Hern descendants still retain their land and remain close.
The voice of Fountain Hughes, Wormley's great-grandson, is preserved in a 1949 interview, one of just a dozen surviving sound recordings of ex-slaves. Hughes speaks tellingly of the trials of black Virginians during and after the Civil War. |