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.
Read more about this topic: John Hemings
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or education:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Very early in our children’s lives we will be forced to realize that the “perfect” untroubled life we’d like for them is just a fantasy. In daily living, tears and fights and doing things we don’t want to do are all part of our human ways of developing into adults.”
—Fred Rogers (20th century)
“Poor devil, poor devil, he’s best gone out of a life where he rides his rocking-horse to find a winner.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“The study of tools as well as of books should have a place in the public schools. Tools, machinery, and the implements of the farm should be made familiar to every boy, and suitable industrial education should be furnished for every girl.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)