On Saturday, September 17, Monticello, along with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Virginia, hosted a public race summit for thousands on the West Lawn of Jefferson’s famous home. Memory, Mourning, Mobilization: Legacies of Slavery and Freedom in America featured...
This winter, as part of the exciting multi-year effort to restore Monticello to its appearance in Jefferson’s time, we are recreating a log dwelling that likely once housed members of the enslaved Hemings family. The recreated 12’ x 14’ log quarter is being reconstructed on Mulberry Row, “the main...
Since November, Monticello’s archaeology team has been battling record cold and snow. We have excavated a 140-foot long trench running from the smokehouse in the South Dependency, across the Kitchen Yard and down to the vegetable garden terrace (Figure 1). The trench will contain pipes serving the...
In the coming months visitors to Monticello will have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see Jefferson’s “storehouse for nailrod and other iron” recreated on Mulberry Row. Building on more than eight years of planning and over 50 years of research and archaeological investigations, the site...
At the southwestern end of Mulberry Row, Monticello’s principal plantation street, are the ruins of Jefferson’s ca. 1770 joiners’ shop. The shop was used by Jefferson’s free and enslaved carpenters to produce fine architectural woodwork and furniture until Jefferson’s death in 1826. The building is...
Slavery’s definition is also its crime – it is the ultimate denial of personhood. For decades, historians have worked to restore the humanity denied to the millions of Africans who were forcibly brought to the Americas in the holds of slave ships and then made to endure the violence and coercion of...
On November 7, 1805, William Clark and Meriwether Lewis reached a large body of water. Thinking it was the Pacific Ocean, Clark wrote “ Ocian in view ! Oh! The Joy!” We know now that the Lewis and Clark Expedition was almost nearly there – only 20 miles from their destination (they had just reached...
A two-day symposium at Monticello that featured panel discussions exploring recent innovations in slavery research and its impact on scholarship and public interpretation.
