Lewis Woodson (January 1806 – January 1878) was an educator, minister, writer, and abolitionist. He was an early leader in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Woodson started and helped to build other institutions within the free African-American communities in Ohio and western Pennsylvania prior to the American Civil War.
Woodson was among the original 24 trustees to found Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1856, in a collaboration between the AME and the Cincinnati Methodist Council. When the college faced financial difficulties during the American Civil War, the AME Church bought it from the Methodist Church in 1863, making it the first historically black college to be owned and operated by African Americans.
Birth and early life
Lewis Woodson was the oldest of eleven children born to Thomas and Jemima Woodson, both mixed-race slaves who had gained their freedom. He was born in January 1806 in Greenbrier County, Virginia (now part of West Virginia).
Woodson family oral history, dating to the early nineteenth century, has claimed that Thomas Woodson was the eldest child of Sally Hemings and her master President Thomas Jefferson. That account has been disputed by Jeffersonian historians. Birth certificates were not common until 100 years after Thomas Woodson was born and they were never issued for the birth of slave children. There is no surviving record of Sally Hemings' having given birth to a surviving child before 1795. Professional historians have ignored the erasure of a name of a male slave born in 1790, written into Jefferson's Farm Book by Thomas Jefferson. One letter of the name of the mother of the child survived the erasure. Historians also ignore the newspaper articles of James Callender and others in 1802 and/or the content of articles that are acknowledged. Thomas Woodson was not named Thomas Woodson at birth. Slaves usually did not have a surname.
In addition, results of a 1998 Jefferson DNA study conclusively showed that there was no genetic link between the Jefferson male line and the Woodson male line. The study's major findings were that the Y chromosome of the Jefferson male line matched that of Sally Hemings' son Eston's descendant. The Woodson Y chromosome did show northern European ancestry. The body of the 3rd President, Thomas Jefferson, was not exhumed, thus his DNA (sample) was not tested.
Move to Ohio and later to Pittsburgh
The Woodson family moved from Virginia to Chillicothe, Ohio about 1821. Chillicothe had a strong community of numerous free blacks, a center of abolitionist activity, and a station on the Underground Railroad. Soon the Woodsons helped establish a black Methodist Episcopal congregation there, the first west of the Allegheny Mountains.
Lewis and two brothers, Thomas and John, became ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), a new, independent, African-American denomination started in Philadelphia in 1816. The Woodsons helped establish new congregations in what was then thought of as the western United States. Lewis Woodson moved with his family to Pittsburgh, PA in 1830/1.
Marriage and family
In Chillicothe, Lewis Woodson married Caroline Robinson, also born in Virginia. The Woodsons had ten surviving children, many of whom followed their models in gaining education and contributing to their communities. One of the ten Woodson children married a member of the Tanner family and another married a member of the Highgate family, who had lived in Pennsylvania since well before the American Revolution as free black Americans.
A son of Lewis and Carline Woodson, Granville S. Woodson served on the Executive Committee of the National Equal Rights League. Their grandson George Frederick Woodson earned degrees from Drew University and Morris Brown University. He served as Dean of the Payne Theological Seminary at Wilberforce for over three decades, ending in 1937. Their grandson Howard D. Woodson earned a degree in civil engineering from what is now the University of Pittsburgh in 1899. He contributed to the design of Union Station in Washington, D.C., and also became a civic activist. H.D. Woodson High School is named in his honor.
Greenwood-Praeger published a highly acclaimed non-fiction best seller in 2001, written by a great-great grandson of Lewis and Carline Woodson. C- Span aired this video of one of the author's presentations. The book covered Woodson family genealogy and history. https://www.c-span.org/video/?165070-1/a-president-family
A great-great-great grandson of Lewis and Carline Woodson, Timothy K. Lewis, became a United States District Judge in Pittsburgh in 1991 and became a United States Circuit Judge in 1992.