Monticello Blog

Maintaining your garden in the summer months can require serious determination and stamina, especially here in Virginia where the high temperatures, humidity, mosquitos, ticks, and chiggers conspire to chase the well-meaning gardener indoors to relax in the air-conditioning with a nice cold glass of iced tea.

This year, the Restoration Department concluded their research into the design of Monticello’s original exterior “Venetian” blinds. The search ultimately led them from Monticello to the U.S. Capitol.

Monticello’s iconic west front has been undergoing a major change in the past few months. The columns on the West Portico (aka Southwest Portico) are being restored to their original Jefferson-era appearance.

On May 22, 1957, Marilyn Monroe and her husband of less than a year, Arthur Miller, walked into Monticello, hoping to take a tour without anyone recognizing them. Unfortunately for them, their hopes were dashed almost immediately.

A classic viniagrette seems a likely staple at Monticello's table. From Dining at Monticello, edited by Damon Lee Fowler.

Over the past several weeks, our ongoing archaeological excavations to advance the Kitchen Road Restoration Project have yielded several important discoveries. One of them is a greenstone cobble paving, which we suspect is the base of the Kitchen Path that connected the South Covered Passage to Mulberry Row and the terraced vegetable garden to the south.

Here at the Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, we spend most of our days reading Jefferson’s two-hundred-year-old mail. Jefferson wrote approximately 19,000 letters during his lifetime, so you can imagine how many more letters he also received! And that means we have a lot of different handwriting to navigate.

Time for the December installment of our monthly series in which we post a recipe from The Virginia House-wife, a recipe book published in 1824 by Mary Randolph, kinswoman to Thomas Jefferson.

What gives spurious quotes away as "fakes." When we used to receive questions about these, we would often know right away that it wasn't a genuine excerpt from Jefferson's writings. How did we know?

Around 1811, Jefferson wrote a letter to his granddaughter Cornelia Jefferson Randolph, which contained a list of twelve “Canons of Conduct in Life” – rules to live by, in essence. In 1825 he sent the same list, minus two rules, to a baby boy named Thomas Jefferson Smith in response to a request from the child’s father.