Monticello Blog

Imagine a world where life moved at four miles an hour, and the most one could readily travel in a day was just thirty miles. Such was the slow world Thomas Jefferson was born into in 1743.

For Jefferson, almost any activity could be transformed into an act of citizenship.

In spite of having little of their own time, enslaved African American families at Monticello cultivated a rich horticultural tradition. Through the maintenance of their own garden plots, the enslaved community seized a rare moment of independence to create something for themselves in a world that sought to deny them everything.

Records rarely mention that the preparation, cooking, serving and cleanup for the meals enjoyed by Jefferson, his family and his guests was made possible by Monticello’s enslaved cooks and their families.

Thomas Jefferson had an enemy in Alexander Hamilton, a frenemy in John Adams, and his BFF in James Madison. Jefferson and Madison formed a political partnership and personal friendship that made them the dynamic duo of the Founding Fathers.

In April, 1805, a remarkable shipment was dispatched from a sizable Indian village near what is now Bismarck, North Dakota. A large hand-hewn boat headed down the Missouri River toward the President’s House in Washington, D.C., thousands of miles away, where Thomas Jefferson eagerly awaited word of the progress of the expedition he had promoted.

Visitors to Monticello and the University of Virginia (UVA) can easily see their connections to Thomas Jefferson, the visionary architect of both these U.N. World Heritage sites. The recent dedication of the Memorial to Enslaved Workers at UVA reveals Monticello’s enslaved community and the University are connected as well - names of people enslaved at Monticello are among the names and memory marks of the UVA Memorial’s inner ring.

In 1900, Coralie Franklin Cook was the only African-American woman who was asked to speak at Susan B. Anthony’s 80th birthday celebration. She had spent her life breaking barriers and fighting for the rights of women and women of color.

Despite thousands of surviving documents, LMonticello’s curators have only recently fully understood Jefferson’s comprehensive system for drafting and organizing his correspondence. These eight original objects served as components or tools that Jefferson used to arrange incoming letters, respond to them, often after “elaborate research,” copy his own letters, and organize everything for easy retrieval – even decades later. Jefferson’s Cabinet and Library were the hub of his reading and writing activities.

Our immediate goal was to make way for the first-ever electric lighting system for the area. But there was a much bigger historical payoff: evidence from this fieldwork and from a shovel-test-pit survey we conducted in 2018, reveals how Jefferson, relying on the labor of enslaved workers, sculpted the topography of the East Lawn, beginning in the late 1790s, in a radical transformation of the mountaintop landscape.