Monticello Blog

This summer (2019), Monticello’s Restoration Department will be removing the East Portico’s mid-20th-century wooden beadboard ceiling and restoring its Jefferson-era finish.

Last week our Curatorial and Restoration teams joined forces for an important project: thoroughly cleaning Monticello from floor to ceiling. Affectionally (and accurately) dubbed the “Big Clean,” this annual event helps us preserve the house and prepare for a new year of visitors—but it’s also a lot of work.

On December 28, 1993, Monticello Getting Word historians Lucia "Cinder" Stanton, Dianne Swann-Wright, and Beverly Gray traveled to Chillicothe, Ohio to interview five members of the Pettiford family—three of whom were descendants of Madison Hemings.

The Restoration Department at Monticello undertook a project to repaint the Tea Room for the first time in decades. In order to showcase the nuanced quality of traditional linseed oil based paints like those that would have been applied in Jefferson’s era, we chose to use a custom, traditional linseed-oil paint using hand-ground pigments on all the woodwork in the Tea Room.

“Rebellion to tyrants is Obedience to God” – We have come to think of this impassioned phrase as distinctly Jefferson, but there’s more to this story.

Before the era of Wii’s, Twitter, and Netflix, the Jefferson family entertained themselves with music, reading aloud, or scientific inquiry. As part of an ongoing campaign to restore Monticello’s interiors, curators recently acquired an air pump similar to Jefferson’s lost original.

In mid-September 1817, Thomas Jefferson was preparing to leave Poplar Forest and return home to Monticello, but he had a few errands to run first. He set off for Lynchburg, where he visited the shop of James Newhall and purchased what was perhaps his first and only pair of “ready-made” shoes. Unfortunately, they didn’t fit and Jefferson returned them with a somewhat exasperated note that got me to wondering: where did most people get their shoes, what did those shoes look like, and who made them?

Sometimes a good tree gets planted in what turns out to be a bad location. That’s exactly what an engineer recently discovered near Monticello’s South Wing.

Williams and Johnson recalled several stories during their recent interview for Getting Word, the oral history project documenting memories of descendants of Monticello’s enslaved community. Just a few weeks earlier, they had learned that they are descendants of Peter Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved cook and brewer, and an older brother of Sally Hemings.

Thanks to support from David M. Rubenstein and the Manning Family Foundation, we are now able to reconstruct the North Dependency according to Jefferson’s original plans.