Background
Fountain was a grandson of Wormley Hughes and Ursula Granger, and great-great-grandson of Betty Hemings, the slave matriarch at Monticello.
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Fountain Hughes
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He worked as a laborer for most of his life, moving in 1881 from Virginia to Baltimore, Maryland. He was interviewed in June 1949 about his life by the Library of Congress as part of the Federal Writers" Project of former slaves" oral histories. Wormley Hughes and his family were owned by President Thomas Jefferson at the time of his death.
The recorded interview is online through the Library of Congress and the World Digital Library.
Three daughters of Hughes were sold ultimately to people in Missouri and Mississippi. Others stayed closer.
Fountain Hughes was born a slave near Charlottesville, Virginia and, with his mother, owned by "B". His father, also owned by B, was killed in the American Civil War.
As a slave child, Hughes was sometimes sent as a messenger to another house and would carry a pass to show he was allowed to traveling
He said none of the slave boys were given shoes until they were about 12 or 13. They always went barefoot. He described their sleeping on pallets on the floor of their quarters.
They did not have beds until after freedom.
After being freed, he worked for ten dollars a month. Hughes moved to Baltimore in 1881.
Foreign a time, he worked as a manure hauler for a man named Reed. A recorded interview was conducted with him on June 11, 1949, by Hermond Norwood (a Library of Congress engineer at the time).
lieutenant has been included with other interviews done by the Federal Writers" Project during the Great Depression.
The recording is available online at the World Digital Library, as well as through the Library of Congress. Hughes noted changes from how people lived in the early 20th century. He said that in the 1940s, many people bought things on cr instead of saving up for them.
Children never had money to spend on their own.
When asked which life he preferred, Hughes said he would rather be dead than a slave again. Hughes died in 1957.
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Quotations: "If I"ve wanted anything, I"d wait until I got the money and I paid for it cash.".
Membership
After Thomas Jefferson"s death, Wormley Hughes (who had worked as a gardener) was, among the "elite" slaves who where "given their time." This was an informal freedom, a non-legally binding release from the demands of enslavement without legal release, awarded usually to respective members of the slave-holders own enslaved descendants and, at times, to other slaves deemed to have shown especially dedicated service.
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Born
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Died
1957 (aged 109) -
Nationality
United States