Just as the first cases on COVID-19 were being reported in Virginia, Monticello's archaeologists were completing excavations on the East Lawn, in front on Jefferson's mansion. Our immediate goal was to make way of the first-ever electric lighting system for the area.
Perhaps now, more than ever, we are acutely aware of our built environment. With varied restrictions on travel, work settings, and even social gatherings, our immediate residential surroundings are in sharp focus. Spending more time at home in the age of COVID-19, gardens and porches have become...
According to Google maps it is 3,557 miles from my home in Edinburgh, Scotland, to Monticello. By contrast, my university office is 1.1 miles away from home. At the moment -- I write this during the UK-wide Covid-19 lockdown -- they are both equally inaccessible to me.
Two centuries ago, on February 13, 1819, James Tallmadge, a member of the Democratic-Republican Party formed by Thomas Jefferson, offered an amendment to a bill regarding the admission of the Territory of Missouri into the United States. The so-called Tallmadge Amendment proposed banning further...
On December 28, 1993, Monticello Getting Word historians Lucia "Cinder" Stanton, Dianne Swann-Wright, and Beverly Gray traveled to Chillicothe, Ohio to interview five members of the Pettiford family—three of whom were descendants of Madison Hemings. Since then, Getting Word staff have traveled more...
In January 2000 the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation (the predecessor of today’s Thomas Jefferson Foundation) issued a report concerning the allegation that Thomas Jefferson was the father of some or all of the children of Sally Hemings , an enslaved woman at Monticello. A special research...
A Statement by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation The issue of Jefferson’s paternity has been the subject of controversy for at least two centuries, ranging from contemporary newspaper articles in 1802 (when Jefferson was President) to scholarly debate well into the 1990s. It is now the Thomas...
In mid-September 1817, Thomas Jefferson was preparing to leave Poplar Forest and return home to Monticello, but he had a few errands to run first. He set off for Lynchburg, roughly a dozen miles to the northeast, where he visited the shop of James Newhall. The thirty-five-year-old Newhall was a...
Some brought photographs, others brought books and at least two people brought quilts. But most of those bearing their family treasures at a recent Jefferson School African American Heritage Center event had questions. “Memories Matter,” a Black History Month program sponsored jointly by Monticello...
