In Cincinnati, Grace Hammond worked as a teacher at the Harriet Beecher Stowe School. She eventually became the first Black school psychologist in the Cincinnati Public School system. During most summers, when school was out of session, Hammond traveled to Wellsville, Ohio, to help restore a stone house built around 1802 by her great-great grandfather Edward Devore. The house, sadly now gone, had at one time been a station on the Underground Railroad. 

Grace Hammond was born in Salem, Ohio, in 1886. When she was four years old, her father Harry Hammond died of consumption at the age of 28. Five years later, Grace’s mother Frederica Collins Hammond remarried. Her new husband was Jacques P. Hurndon of McKeesport, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh. 

In 1906, Grace Hammond graduated from the McKeesport High School. Based on a grainy class photo in a local newspaper, she appears to have been the only Black student in her class. She then enrolled at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, where she graduated in 1910. By 1913, she was in Jefferson City, Missouri, teaching Latin, German, and history at Lincoln Institute.

Grace Hammond is part of an intergenerational story of strong, Black women. The Edward Devore house in Wellsville had fallen out of family hands for a period of years, until it was repurchased in 1913 by Grace Hammond’s mother, Frederica Hurndon. From that time forward, restoring the old stone house was a major focus of Hurdon’s life, and of Hammond’s as well. 

Grace Hammond in her high school class. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 6, 1906, p. 7. Public domain.

Around 1927, while Grace Hammond was in Boston, studying at Harvard, she adopted a seven-year-old child named Venessa Keyes. Hammond brought the child back to Cincinnati and enrolled her in the Harriet Beecher Stowe School, and later in Walnut Hills High School. Venessa graduated from high school in 1938 under the name Vanessa Hammond. She showed talent as a dancer, and during her senior year, she was seen by a talent scout from the Ballet Russe, David Lichine.

Lichine arranged for Vanessa Hammond to travel to England, accompanied by her adoptive mother, to study ballet at the Joos/Leeder school at Dartington Hall. After returning to the United States, Grace Hammond resumed work at Stowe School, and Vanessa moved to Hollywood, where she appeared in a number of movies, typically in dance roles.

In 1940, Vanessa Hammond appeared in the film Tin Pan Alley, credited as Princess Vanessa Ammon. Her dance routine opens the “Sheik of Araby” sequence, followed by the Nicholas Brothers. In 1944, she appeared in Action in Arabia, credited as Shusheila Shkari. Also in 1944, she was in Dragon Seed. In 1946, credited as Shusheila Shkari, she appeared in The Razor’s Edge.

Vanessa’s adoptive mother, Grace Hammond, had meanwhile become a school psychologist. She had an office in the Board of Education building. She tested students with behavioral problems or developmental disabilities, and she advised the schools on how to accommodate them. She and her mother Frederica continued spending their summers at the old stone house in Wellsville. 

Grace L. Hammond retired in 1956. Frederica Hurndon died in 1964 and was buried in Wellsville. Grace Hammond died in 1968 and was buried in Cincinnati, in Union Baptist Cemetery. 

Grace Hammond had perhaps hoped that her adopted daughter would continue work on the old stone house in Wellsville, but this was not Vanessa Hammond’s life path. Vanessa – she usually went by “Princess Vanessa” – lived a fabulous life in Los Angeles. When she married Anton Lang in 1945, her bridesmaids included actresses and an aerialist. When she had a son, the godfather was Basil Rathbone. In 1946, she attended the premier of the film “Oklahoma” wearing an ice-blue velvet gown, a sable jacket, and a diamond tiara. She stayed in California, even after the old stone house in Wellsville had changed hands again and fallen into ruin. Vanessa Hammond Lang died in California in 2005.

Editor’s note: Chris Hanlin is a retired architect and local historian in Cincinnati. He is co-author of “Bicycling Through Paradise: Historical Tours Around Cincinnati.” He is a member of the Black Historical Sites Advisory Committee of the Cincinnati Preservation Association.