CaClark...here's the whole article. I probably should
delete it in a few days.
A Mysterious Grave Haunts a Town
By TINA KELLEY
Published: July 2, 2000
A tale of history tinged with mystery caught the attention
of the Orange County, N.Y., hamlet of Southfields yesterday, as two amateur
historians declared that in their midst (sort of) lay the bones (maybe) of a
heretofore unknown descendant of Thomas Jefferson.
The local newspaper, The Times Herald-Record of
Middletown, announced on its front page yesterday that the historians, Roger
A. King of Monroe, N.Y., and Robert Brennan of Pine Bush, N.Y., might have
found the younger Jefferson's grave in an old Orange County cemetery.
The paper cited the discovery of two pieces of a
tombstone, one belonging to a man named Thomas Jefferson who had died in
1855, the other reading ''son of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings'' -- the
slave long believed to have borne children by him.
Mr. King and Mr. Brennan called a news conference to
repeat their findings yesterday afternoon at the Red Apple Restaurant, on
Route 17 in Southfields. Speaking to about 35 people, over the clatter of
cutlery and coffee cups, they described parts of their theory: that Sally
Hemings gave birth in 1809 to an eighth child, a son, that she had with
Thomas Jefferson. And that the boy, Thomas Jr., was brought north soon
afterward to New York, out of slavery, by Elizabeth Monroe, who later became
the nation's fifth first lady and who was a friend of Hemings's.
An eighth child of Jefferson and his slave mistress, and a
New Yorker, at that? Big news, if true: in the long-running debate over
whether Jefferson and Hemings had children together, and if so how many,
historians usually stop at seven. In 1998, an article in the scientific
journal Nature reported that DNA tests provided compelling evidence that
Jefferson fathered at least one of Hemings's children.
Mr. King and Mr. Brennan presented as evidence two sisters
who claimed to be descendants of the newly discovered Thomas Jefferson Jr..
They recalled how one of their uncles had researched the family tree -- then
stopped, mysteriously. There were rumors in the family, the women said, that
he had discovered the connection between Jefferson and his mistress, and the
uncle did not want to know more.
Soon after the news conference, a few dozen people,
including a handful of reporters and photographers, walked from the
restaurant to the John Coffey Jr. Cemetery in Southfields, a small, lumpy
knoll with stones in various stages of disrepair. There, they saw the stone
that read ''In memory of Thomas Jefferson who died April 25, 1855 Ae 46 Yrs
& 12 Ds.''
But the piece of stone identifying him as a son of
Jefferson and Hemings was nowhere to be found. The same was true of Mr.
King, who was, it turned out, one of the few people around claiming to have
actually seen the second half of the gravestone. He had given rubbings of
the stone to Mr. Brennan, who has not seen the actual stone, and Chris
Sonne, the historian for the town of Tuxedo, who accompanied Mr. King to the
graveyard Friday on a fruitless search for the second piece of the stone.
After Mr. King left the restaurant for parts unknown, Mr.
Sonne said, ''I have every reason to believe it to exist, because you can't
fake an etching, but I am really somewhat mystified.''
Jefferson scholars reached by telephone yesterday were not
about to jump on the next plane to Orange County.
''I would be the last person to say anything is
impossible, but it strikes me as very unlikely,'' said Annette Gordon-Reed,
a professor at New York Law School and author of ''Thomas Jefferson and
Sally Hemings: An American Controversy'' (University Press of Virginia,
1997). The child, she said, would have to have been conceived a month and a
half after Hemings gave birth to her son Eston, and there was no later child
listed in Jefferson's farm book, which lists Hemings's other children.
Dr. Gordon-Reed said the discovery of the tombstone raises
the unlikely possibility of there being three Jefferson sons named Thomas:
Thomas Eston, who went by his middle name; the Southfields Thomas; and
Thomas Woodson, some of whose descendants claim the relation, though DNA
testing has cast doubt on it.
There is also the problem of the memoirs of Madison
Hemings, whom Dr. Gordon-Reed considers one of the four known children of
Jefferson and Hemings (the others were Beverly, Harriet and Eston.)
''He lists his siblings, and Eston, he says, is the last
one,'' said Dr. Gordon-Reed, who is now writing a biography of the Hemings
family. ''Why wouldn't he know this kid? He would have been somebody he grew
up with, just like his other siblings.''
And family tradition claiming descent from the famous
couple does not count for much, she added. ''If all the people who claim to
be descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings really were,'' Dr.
Gordon-Reed said, ''she would have had hundreds of children.
''It may be possible, but there's nothing that indicates
if it's true. Right now there's nothing in the documentary record that
supports it.''
Joseph J. Ellis, a history professor at Mount Holyoke
College and author of ''American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson''
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1997) also said the new claims appeared doubtful.
''Let's listen to what the men have to say, but the
historical evidence we do have doesn't seem to take a shape that makes this
very likely,'' he said.
''There has never been in any of the record -- either in
the written or oral traditions, on the white or black side of the argument
that has been going on in the longest-running soap opera in American
history -- any previous claim that a child was born after Eston.''
At the news conference, Mr. King said he was unfazed by
such questions, which he had expected.
''I don't have a problem with anybody doubting,'' he said.
''That's how the truth will come out.''
Located at:
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F2071EF63E5D0C718CDDAE0894D8404482&n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fPeople%2fH%2fHemings%2c%20Sally
Anne
Anne Pemberton
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http://www.erols.com/apembert
http://www.educationalsynthesis.org
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