page_title: Winney Grimshaw
section_title: Family and childhood
hierarchical_section_title: Winney Grimshaw / Family and childhood
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait by Charles Bird King, photograph by R Tayloe Cook VII
context_page_description: Winney Grimshaw was an enslaved African-American woman at Mount Airy Plantation in Richmond County, Virginia. The Grimshaws are one of the most well-documented enslaved families who lived at Mount Airy. Though the Grimshaws were a well-regarded slave family at Mount Airy, it wasn’t enough to keep their master from dissolving her family ties.
context_section_description: Her parents were Esther Jackson and Bill Grimshaw, enslaved by William Henry Tayloe. Both were valuable to Mount Airy, as Esther was a spinner, and Bill served as Tayloe’s head carpenter from 1832 to 1845. Bill worked on the Octagon in Washington D.C., the Tayloe’s winter residence and later the temporary home of President Madison and his family for six months after the British burned the White House.  
  Mount Airy did not keep birth records, but Winney Grimshaw is listed on the inventory for the Old House on January 1, 1827, recorded as being one year old. Esther and Bill had seven children, Lizza (1824), Winney (1826), Anna (1827), Juliet (1829), James (1831), Charlotte (1834), and Henry (1837).  
  In 1830, at four years old, Grimshaw was sent to Washington D.C. to live with her grandmother and namesake, Winney Jackson, who worked as Anne Tayloe’s chambermaid. At age five, she returned to Mount Airy lived with her mother in the Old House, and her father lived a few miles away at the home quarter of Mount Airy. Grimshaw did not have an assigned job until 1839, when she was thirteen years old. Most enslaved children had been working for a few years by this age. Due to Esther’s role as a spinner, she was often in close proximity to the household where Grimshaw spent much of her childhood. 
  In 1840, at fourteen, Grimshaw was sent out to her first job accompanied by her sisters - Anna, twelve years old, and Juliet, ten years old. They were lent to Mrs. William N. Ward, the wife of a local clergyman. She was expected to feed, clothe, and house the girls. This was an easy way for masters to train young enslaved girls for the life of domestic service. 
  Around 1841 or 1842, Winney returned to Mount Airy, living for the first time without the company of her family. She lived on a farming quarter with forty other slaves, though her job was to tend to Mrs. Monday, the sickly wife of her white master. A year later in 1843, at seventeen years old, Winney Grimshaw was documented as a spinner, and in 1844 she married Jacob Carrington who had worked in the plantation’s gristmill since the age of nine. Jacob Carrington’s father was unusual in that he was an emancipated African American, though this did not benefit Jacob as the law of partus sequitur ventrem ruled that the title of slavery was passed down maternally. Together Winney and Jacob lived in the home quarter, and in 1844 at eighteen years old, Grimshaw gave birth to her first son, John Carrington.
caption: Portrait of William Henry Tayloe by Charles Bird King
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