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Fossett was born in Richmond in November 1780, the son of Mary Hemings and an unknown father, possibly William Fossett, a free carpenter who worked intermittently at Monticello late in the 1770s. Mary Hemings, the oldest child of Elizabeth “Betty” Hemings, was at the time an enslaved domestic servant in the household of Governor Thomas Jefferson. Three months later she and her children were carried off by British troops during Benedict Arnold’s raid on the capital. After Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown in October 1781, Fossett and his family were brought back to Monticello, Jefferson’s residence in Albemarle County.
During Jefferson’s absence in France (1784–1789), Fossett lived in Charlottesville with his mother and siblings. She had been hired to a white merchant, Thomas Bell, by whom she had two children. Unable to marry legally, Bell and Mary Hemings, described by her grandson Robert Scott as a “bright mulatto,” lived as husband and wife, an arrangement open
SUMMARY
On land inherited from his father, Peter Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson established himself as a member of the Virginia planter elite at Monticello, his plantation in Albemarle County. Construction on the house began in 1769 and continued at intervals until 1809. It is a testament to Jefferson’s interest in classical architecture and the importance of education in the Early Republic, and a statement about his position in society. The plantation began as a tobacco farm and shifted to wheat and grain cultivation in the 1790s, a decade that saw many changes to the landscape and the built environment of the approximately 105 enslaved people living there. Monticello ceased activity as a working plantation after Jefferson’s death in 1826, passed through multiple owners, and was purchased by what is now the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in 1923. Open to the public today, Monticello is both a typical example of a piedmont Virginia plantation in the late eig