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November 17
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November 17
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Join us on November 17, 2024 for a special celebration commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Marquis de Lafayette visiting Thomas Jefferson at Monticello in November of 1824.
11am: Kids activities, French lessons & games, shopping, food and wine for purchase, and wine tastings available throughout the day
11:30am: Performance, Lafayette Returns
As the 50th anniversary of the Revolution approaches, famous Revolutionary War hero Lafayette returns to America from France. Welcome him to Monticello, witness his reunion with dear friend Thomas Jefferson, and reflect on America's promises of liberty and equality as these Founders look to the future.
Performed by Bill Barker, Charles Wissinger, Nicole Brown, and Jamar Jones. Music provided by David McCormick, Early Music Access Project.
12:00pm: Lightning Talk, Lafayette's Return to Albemarle
2024 marks the bicentennial of Lafayette’s triumphal American tour, when the last surviving Revolutionary War general visited every American state and inspired massive patriotic celebrations wherever he went. J. Jefferson Looney, the Daniel P. Jordan Editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, describes both Lafayette’s touching reunion with Jefferson at Monticello and the formal ceremonies and dinners with which the Charlottesville community greeted Lafayette, and sets these festivities within the broader context of Lafayette’s extended stay in the United States.
12:30pm: Meet Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette
Guests can meet and ask questions with Jefferson and Lafayette (featuring historical interpreters Bill Barker and Charles Wissinger)
1:00 pm: Beyond the Performance
Join historical interpreters Nicole Brown and Jamar Jones and musician David McCormick as they discuss their crafts
2:00pm: Reenactment, Lafayette Returns
As the 50th anniversary of the Revolution approaches, famous Revolutionary War hero Lafayette returns to America from France. Welcome him to Monticello, witness his reunion with dear friend Thomas Jefferson, and reflect on America's promises of liberty and equality as these Founders look to the future.
Performed by Bill Barker, Charles Wissinger, Nicole Brown, and Jamar Jones. Music provided by David McCormick, Early Music Access Project.
2:40pm: Meet Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette
Guests can meet and ask questions with Jefferson and Lafayette (featuring historical interpreters Bill Barker and Charles Wissinger)
3:10 pm: Beyond the Performance
Join historical interpreters Nicole Brown and Jamar Jones as they discuss the craft of portraying people of the past.
4:00 pm: Program concludes
4:30 pm: Monticello property closes
Veteran historical actor-interpreter Bill Barker is widely recognized as the nation’s foremost interpreter of Thomas Jefferson. After portraying Thomas Jefferson at Colonial Williamsburg for 26 years, Barker joined the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello in 2019. Barker began interpreting Jefferson in 1984 — fittingly, at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Combining the tools of theater with rigorous historical scholarship, his approach explores Jefferson’s life and times, and how it relates to our world today.
Barker has performed as Jefferson around the country and around the world, at sites including the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the Palace of Versailles, and more. He has been featured as Jefferson in numerous publications including TIME, People, and Southern Living, and has appeared as Jefferson on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, C-SPAN and Comedy Central’s Colbert Report.
Nicole Brown is a PhD Candidate in American Studies at the College of William and Mary. As a first-person historical interpreter, Brown portrays a variety of women from the Colonial and Antebellum Eras; one of these individuals include Monticello’s Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, the wife of Thomas Jefferson. Brown is also working on a scholarly publication with Diane Ehrenpreis (Monticello’s Curator of Decorative Arts and Historic Interiors) about the political involvement of women at Monticello during the American Revolution.
J. Jefferson Looney is the Daniel P. Jordan Editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. He is the founding editor-in-chief of the Jefferson Papers Retirement Series, sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., Charlottesville, Virginia. Twenty volumes of this definitive edition of Jefferson’s writings and correspondence between 1809 and 1826 have been published, and a twenty-first is in press. Dr. Looney was formerly editor and project director of the Dictionary of Virginia Biography, and he is a past president of the Association for Documentary Editing. He is the author or editor of several works on the history of Princeton University, where he did his doctoral work in British history.
Jamar Jones is an award-winning actor, teaching artist, and museum theater practitioner. Jamar received the 2019 Richmond Theatre Critics Circle Award- Best Actor in a Play for An Octoroon (TheatreLab), and the 2022 RTCC Award- Best Lead Performance- Play for Fires in the Mirror (Firehouse Theatre). He has collaborated with museums and historic sites throughout Virginia and Washington, DC, including the International Spy Museum, American Revolution Museum at Yorktown, Mount Vernon, and Colonial Williamsburg to research, craft, and share the stories of enslaved and free black people. Education: The College of William and Mary (BA) and UNC Chapel Hill (MFA). www.jamarjonesofficial.com
David McCormick (baroque fiddle) is artistic director of Early Music Access Project, executive director of Early Music America, a founding member of Brooklyn-based medieval ensemble Alkemie, and a 2020 fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies. He plays on a violin by Jonathan Vacanti.
Charles Wissinger is an actor whose skills have been featured on HBO, PBS, American Heroes Channel, History Channel, National Geographic, the big screen, films in museums, and multiple local theaters in Central Virginia. He still works with the Historic St. John's Church Foundation re-enacting Patrick Henry's "Liberty or Death" speech, and doing first-person presentations as the Marquis De Lafayette, Audie Murphy, and Edgar Allan Poe, among others. On the main stage his favorite roles include J. Pierpont Finch (How to Succeed...), Frank Butler (Annie Get Your Gun), Bob Wallace (White Christmas) and The Old Man (A Christmas Story: The Musical).
This is an outdoor event; please dress accordingly.
In the event of rain or severe weather, the program will take place in the visitor center theater and classrooms with an adjusted schedule of events.
Listen to this podcast about Lafayette's twelve-day visit with his old friend, Thomas Jefferson, which was marked by dinners and celebrations. It struck many as memorable at the time, including two men enslaved at Monticello for whom, even decades later, Lafayette's visit held special meaning.
On July 3, 1789, just before the storming of the Bastille and two months before he returned to America, Jefferson purchased a number of busts from famed sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon. Among these was a terra-cotta patinated plaster of Jefferson's trusted friend, the Marquis de Lafayette.
On this episode of Mountaintop History, Monticello guide Alison Kiernan looks at how a seemingly innocuous object—a small, decorative cockade given to a young Martha at party in Paris—reveals a story that spans two continents and three and a half decades, from revolutionary France to a joyful reunion at Monticello.
