On Monday September 17, the archaeology department began the final phase of excavation required to support the Foundation’s exciting plans to restore Jefferson’s Kitchen Road. In the first decades of the nineteenth century the Kitchen Road linked Monticello’s kitchen, at the south end of the...
Earlier this year, Monticello's archaeology team located the remains of a previously undocumented building on Mulberry Row. The new find consists of a brick paving that served as the floor of a log structure whose walls have left no visible trace. Only the northern edge of the paving has been...
This year Monticello launched the new ‘Getting Word’ website —a vast collection of oral histories, images, and documentation encompassing seven generations of families descended from Monticello’s African American community. The website is the result of decades of research, nearly twenty years of...
The New York Times calls it "an invaluable companion book" to the recently opened exhibition Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello: Paradox of Liberty. This pioneering work by Monticello's Shannon Senior Research Historian Cinder Stanton has deepened our understanding of Jefferson—his character and...
Monticello's joint exhibition with the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture opens Jan 27., at the National Museum of American History on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Admission is free, and we hope you'll get a chance to experience it before it closes on Oct...
The AP's Zinie Chen Sampson writes about three new projects launching this winter to shed light on the slaves who lived and worked at Monticello. The article has appeared in several U.S. media outlets as well as in the UK and India. Read it online (no longer available).
A recent entry in the New York Times' ongoing Disunion feature revisiting the Civil War, highlights an interview with Fountain Hughes, whose ancestors were slaves at Monticello, and cites the work of our own Cinder Stanton. Hughes's interview, originally recorded as part of the Slave Narrative...
“What is the coolest thing you’ve ever found?” This is a question I get often yet it is one of the most difficult to answer. Everything that we find provides valuable information for our research of how people lived in the past, so what we think is “cool” may not be what others would say is “cool...
Everyone knows that archaeologists dig. But it is less widely appreciated that just how they dig and what they find varies with the kinds of questions they ask and the assumptions they make. Two excavation campaigns were conducted on Mulberry Row -- the first in 1957 and the second in the early...
In a time when there was no thought of providing former chief executives with pensions, Thomas Jefferson relied primarily on the produce of his farms for subsistence and money. His main cash crops were wheat and tobacco. The third president generally prided himself on the quality of the staples...
