A MORGAN CONNECTION?

In Lexington a portrait of Garrett Morgan hangs on an interior wall at the historic John Hunt Morgan house (renamed Hopemont). This raises the question whether there is truth to persistent stories that the famous inventor descended from Confederate Gen. John Hunt Morgan, a white Kentuckian who held Black persons in slavery.

Sandra Morgan, Garrett Morgan’s granddaughter, told Linda Blackford of the Lexington Herald-Leader in 2021 that her family has long heard rumors about white ancestry leading directly to the general. But the family cannot prove any of this, she told Blackford.

Sandra Morgan was invited by the Blue GrassTrust for Historic Preservation to give a talk in 2021 about her grandfather. She opened her talk with an acknowledgment of the stories about her family’s relationship to John Hunt Morgan, saying her grandfather’s father, Sidney Morgan, was a son of the Confederate general and an enslaved woman in his household.

“This shouldn’t be news to anyone,” Sandra Morgan said. “Complex relationships between owners and the enslaved were common knowledge.”

Blue GrassTrust owns Hopemont, where the general never lived although the house was the residence of his mother. Hopemont was the original name of the house before it popularly became known as the John Hunt Morgan house.When a citywide controversy arose in recent years over a larger-than-life bronze installed on the lawn of the old courthouse, memorializing General Morgan riding a horse, the name of his mother’s house reverted to Hopemont.The general’s mount had been incorrectly cast in bronze as a stallion. Morgan rode a mare named Black Bess.