How do we know what Monticello looked like during Jefferson’s time? Monticello has been called one of the best-documented plantations, and the same goes for the house interior; we are lucky to have a wealth of correspondence, visitor accounts, and even diagrams from Jefferson’s time. Today, we take...
Writing to fellow architect Benjamin Labtrobe seven months after retiring from the presidency, Jefferson described Monticello as his "essay in architecture." Always balancing practicality with beauty, Jefferson noted his essay "has been so much subordinated to the law of convenience, & affected...
Most exterior shutters today are eye-pleasing accents, decorative but not functional. But for Thomas Jefferson, shutters provided shade from what he described as "the constant, beaming, almost vertical sun of Virginia" while permitting airflow from summer breezes. They also protected the expensive...
The Dome Room and the Cuddy are two very different spaces situated adjacent to one another on the third floor of Monticello, but they are alike in that neither has been visited much over the life of this busy house. In 1809 Margaret Bayard Smith, Jefferson’s friend and frequent guest, called the...
One of the most poignant of Jeffersonian artifacts is a 1782 scrap of paper with a quotation from the novel Tristram Shandy , written in Martha Wayles Jefferson’s hand but then taken up by her husband Thomas, as she was too weak to finish. Beginning with the phrase “time wastes too fast,” the...
Monticello Associate Curator Diane Ehrenpreis takes us through Jefferson's interest in innovation and technology and the story behind his revolving desk.
The winter of 1803-1804 was particularly busy for President Thomas Jefferson. The Barbary Pirate War smoldered, the U.S. flag was raised over New Orleans for the first time, and the Lewis and Clark Expedition .
The year is 1804. James Bowdoin III, now the American minister to Spain, comes across a marble sculpture while visiting Paris. Believing that Thomas Jefferson would enjoy it, he ships the piece to Virginia with a letter written, “a Cleopatra copied and reduced from the ancient one now at Paris...
On February 5, 1769, Thomas Jefferson replied to his cousin’s request that his son study law under him. Writing from Shadwell , his boyhood home, Jefferson said he must decline: "I do not expect to be here more than two months in the whole between this and November next, at which time I propose to...
This summer, Monticello’s Restoration Department will be removing the East Portico’s mid-20th-century wooden beadboard ceiling and restoring its Jefferson-era finish, a traditional three-coat lime plaster. An 1807 letter from mason and plasterer Hugh Chisholm to Jefferson provides the best...
