Biographies

Members of the Hubbard Family

The following biographies were originally written by Dr. Barbara Heath in 2000. Additions and updates were provided by Karen McIlvoy and other members of Poplar Forest’s Department of Archaeology and Landscapes in 2025.

Hannah

Born in 1770 at Monticello, Hannah and her family were moved to Poplar Forest when she was a teenager. There she met and married Solomon. Like others who married within the plantation community, Hannah established a new household with her husband. It is probable that Solomon died between 1793 and 1795, leaving behind his wife and three young children.
 
By 1798, Hannah married Hall, a plantation blacksmith and hogkeeper. The couple had an additional six children together. Hannah’s last child was born in 1812.
 
Hannah likely worked in the agricultural fields as a young woman. Her mother, Cate, trained girls to spin flax and wool into yarn, so Hannah likely learned this skill at an early age. As an adult she is said to have supervised the daily work of the spinning and weaving operation at Poplar Forest. By 1811, Hannah served as housekeeper and cook during Jefferson’s visits to Poplar Forest. Hannah also nursed her fellow enslaved men and women when they were sick or injured.
 
Hannah could read and write, skills that she probably shared with other slaves. A single surviving letter written in 1818 from Hannah to Jefferson describes the state of the house and sends wishes for his health. Hannah also expressed her Christian faith in the letter, one of the few hints that survive of the spiritual beliefs of people living at Poplar Forest.
 
When an epidemic hit the enslaved community in 1819, Hannah’s husband Hall and younger brother Phill both died. That autumn, her son Billy was involved in a violent altercation with an overseer. After a second incident in 1822, Hanah’s son was taken away from her and transported to Louisiana. The last appearance of Hannah’s in the historical records is from an appraisal of Jefferson’s property in Campbell County, Virginia at the time of his death in 1826. Hannah is listed at a value of $300. Hannah’s fate remains unknown.

James

James Hubbard was born in 1743. At age 30, his previous owner, John Wayles, died, and James was inherited by Thomas Jefferson. James was moved from Elk Hill, a plantation in Goochland County, to Monticello, where he worked as a waterman, carrying goods up the river to market and returning with plantation supplies. His work subjected him to only loose supervision, as he navigated the rivers between Charlottesville and Richmond. However, the move separated him from his family.
 
Upon the death of Nan Hubbard, James’s three youngest children, Joan, Armistead, and Nace, were moved to Monticello to be with their father. By 1783, James married Cate, the mother of two young daughters, Hannah and Rachael. Together, James and Cate had six more children.
 
By the late 1780s, Jefferson moved the family to Poplar Forest. There, James became the headman at the Bear Creek quarter farm, supervising field laborers under the direction of the Poplar Forest overseer. This position demanded that James enforce rules and discipline within his community, but provided him and his family a measure of higher standing with Jefferson. In his later years, James became one of the two men listed as hogkeepers who were responsible for overseeing the hundreds of pigs raised at Poplar Forest.
 
James Hubbard lived to be a great-grandfather. His children’s lives reflect the range of experiences common among enslaved people. Joan was given away as part of Martha Jefferson’s dowry in 1790. Nancy, possibly developmentally disabled, died as a teenager in 1805. Nace followed in his father’s footsteps and became a headman until he was injured and switched to duties as a gardener for Jefferson’s retreat. James, who shared his father’s name, became a habitual runaway, and Jefferson sold him at age 29. Phill was trained at Monticello in carpentry, but was allowed to return home to his family at Poplar Forest before his untimely death at a young age. James’s step-daughter Hannah became Jefferson’s housekeeper and cook at Poplar Forest, ran the spinning and weaving operations, and nursed sick and injured members of the community.
 
James Hubbard remained at Poplar Forest with his wife until his death, sometime between 1820 and 1826.

Phill

Phill Hubbard was born at Poplar Forest in 1786, to headman James Hubbard and his wife Cate. Jefferson sent Phill, at age ten, to Monticello to work in the nailery, making nails both for the plantation and for sale. During the years he lived at Monticello, Hubbard was allowed to visit his family for a few days at Christmas time. For the remainder of the year, he depended on news from home carried by others traveling between the plantations. From 1810-1812, when not needed elsewhere, he worked as a field hand at Jefferson’s Tufton quarter farm in Albemarle County. As a young man, he was also trained in carpentry, masonry, and landscaping. Phill was often dispatched to help the masons and plasterers during the construction of the retreat house at Poplar Forest and spent several months excavating the sunken lawn there between 1807 and 1808.
 
Jefferson then ordered Hubbard’s return to Monticello, where he was to saw wood for carpenter Elisha Watkins who had been hired to construct a fence enclosing the 1000-foot-long kitchen garden and north orchard in 1808. In 1809, Hubbard was back at Poplar Forest, assisting plasterer John Richardson with his work. Three years later, Jefferson recommended that Hubbard be one of two Poplar Forest slaves assigned to work with Chisolm in plastering the house “because he understands the making mortar so well.”
 
Phill Hubbard returned permanently to Poplar Forest in 1812, though he did not live at the same housing quarter as his parents. He married Hanah, the daughter of Dick and Dinah. She worked as a spinner, and was ten years his junior. Although marriages between enslaved persons were not legally recognized, Jefferson encouraged them between men and women living on his plantations, writing “certainly there is nothing I desire so much as that all the young people in the estate should intermarry with one another and stay at home. They are worth a great deal more in that case than when they have husbands and wives abroad.”
 
At Christmastime 1814, Phill Hubbard had a dispute with one of Jefferson’s Poplar Forest overseers, Jeremiah Goodman. Goodman interfered with the match between Phill and Hanah. A few days later, Phill ran away to Monticello to plead his case before Jefferson, saying that the overseer had driven him off and punished Hanah for receiving him at her home. Jefferson interceded on the couple’s behalf. He further warned Goodman against punishing Phill, explaining that he had known Hubbard since he was a boy and that he did not have the character of a runaway. Phill returned to Bedford, and as he had requested, moved with his wife to the Bear Creek quarter farm. There he lived close to his parents and further from the influence of Goodman, who was dismissed by Jefferson in 1815.
 
Phill and Hanah had one son, Dick, born in 1815. Unfortunately, in June of 1819, Phill passed away in an epidemic that hit the Poplar Forest community in the spring of that year. He was 33. Hanah did not remarry.

Billy

Billy was born in July 1799 to Hannah, Jefferson’s cook and housekeeper, and her second husband Hall, one of the property’s blacksmiths. Billy was most likely their second child together (Hannah’s fifth). Hannah’s last known child was born in 1812, so Billy had at least two older sisters, two older brothers, and four younger brothers.
 
In 1813, when Billy was only 14 years old, one of the other young residents of Poplar Forest, Hercules, ran away. Hercules was only five years older than Billy, and they both lived at the Tomahawk Creek quarter farm. Hercules was captured and jailed as a runaway before being returned to Bedford. Jefferson was inclined to be relatively lenient on him, but it is ultimately unclear as to the extent of Hercules’s punishment or whether it had any effect on Billy.
 
In 1816, at age 17, Billy was sent to Monticello to learn a skilled trade. Jefferson often transferred teenage boys to the nailery at Monticello as a sort of testing ground for them, but in this case, Jefferson sent him to work directly with his enslaved joiner John Hemmings. The next year, Billy was deemed “too ungovernable” and transferred to the cooper’s shop. He did not fare well there either and was soon sent back to working in the fields. Billy then returned to Poplar Forest in 1818 to live with his family.
 
In 1819, an epidemic swept through Poplar Forest and many members of the enslaved community became gravely ill, including Billy’s father, Hall. Hall died by June of 1819, and Billy’s mother Hannah served as the main caregiver for the sick at this time.
 
On October 10, 1819, the head overseer chose to make the enslaved field laborers work on a Sunday to make up for rain and frost the previous few days. As Sunday was their only day of rest, most of the people had already disappeared to church gatherings or elsewhere when he went in search of them. In the course of the day, Bowling Clark, a subordinate overseer, happened upon Billy and ordered him to work. The specifics of the encounter are unclear, but according to a letter to Jefferson by head overseer Joel Yancey, it soon escalated to violence. Billy ended up beating Clark with rocks. Clark was able to get ahold of one of the stones and hit back, at which point Billy bit Clark’s thumb and “made his escape”. He returned a week or so later but the documents that recorded any possible punishment have been lost.
 
Three years later, in October 1822, Billy stabbed another overseer named William Gough. While his mother Hannah staunched the bleeding, saving Gough’s life, Billy and two other young enslaved men (Hercules and Gawen) ran off. They were all captured within days and jailed in nearby Lynchburg. All three enslaved men were charged with “conspiracy to incite a slave revolt”, but Jefferson hired a competent lawyer to defend them, and they were quickly acquitted for lack of evidence. Only Billy was actually found guilty of a crime, namely stabbing Gough, and was sentenced to be “burnt in the hand and whipped”.
 
Despite the acquittal, Jefferson sent Billy, Hercules, Gawen, and one other man, Manuel, to Louisiana. They were hired out to Colonel Croghan, just outside New Orleans. Unfortunately, both Hercules and Gawen died from an unknown illness within a year. Manuel also became sick, but we are not certain if he ever recovered.
 
Billy also became ill, but ran away from the plantation after his recovery. He made his way to New Orleans, where he was captured and jailed. He was then retrieved from jail and subsequently sold.