NEWS
(Photo Clarissa Villondo)
Marker Honors Ona Judge
A new historical marker recognizing Ona Judge, the African American woman who fled enslavement by the Washington household and escaped to freedom, was unveiled at a ceremony at Mount Vernon on Juneteenth (June 19).
Hosted by Mount Vernon District Supervisor Dan Storck, the event featured guest speakers Atif Qarni, Virginia secretary of education, and Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Ph.D., author of Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge.
Students in Maura Keaney’s fifth grade class at Laurel Ridge Elementary School nominated Judge for recognition with a historical marker. The class wrote nomination letters as part of Virginia governor Ralph Northam’s Black History Month Historical Marker Contest. The students, along with their teacher, attended the ceremony.
Ona Judge, often called Oney by the Washingtons, was born at Mount Vernon around 1774. She was the daughter of Betty, an enslaved seamstress living on Mansion House Farm, and Andrew Judge, a white English tailor whom Washington had hired. She fled the Washington home in Philadelphia in 1796 as they prepared to return to Virginia, eventually making her way to New Hampshire. She went on to marry and start a family, evading several attempts to recapture her over the years.
Following the unveiling, Brenda Parker, Mount Vernon character interpreter and African American interpretation and special projects coordinator, presented “Freedom Skies,” a narrative told through story and song about the experiences of four of those freed after George Washington’s death.
See a Penny, Pick it Up
While excavating a small test unit south of the Mansion in support of the south end restoration, the archaeology team recovered a George III halfpenny with a date of 1775 from buried 18th-century topsoil. Standard currency in the Virginia colony, halfpennies were copper coins about the size of a U.S. half-dollar, minted officially by the English Crown between 1770 and 1775, and unofficially by counterfeiters, sometimes using dies stolen from the mint. The late Ivor Noël Hume, who headed Colonial Williamsburg’s archaeological mission, estimated that up to 60 percent of copper coins in circulation were forgeries produced either of brass or underweight copper; many of these counterfeit coins have been found at colonial sites. However, Mount Vernon’s example—bearing the profile of George III on one side (photo, top left) and a female figure of “Britannia” and the date on the reverse (photo, bottom left)—is an officially minted coin.