Early Life and Education
John was born into slavery as the son of the mixed-race slave Betty Hemings and Joseph Neilson, an Irish workman at Monticello. Of three-quarters European ancestry, he was the eleventh of Betty's children, and half-brother to her six children by her late master John Wayles, as well as to the oldest four by another father.
Hemmings started his working life as an "out-carpenter." He chopped trees, hewed logs, built fences and barns, and helped to build the log slave dwellings on Mulberry Row at the plantation. This relatively unskilled work was just the beginning of his artisan career.
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