Monticello Blog

Thanks to support from David M. Rubenstein and the Manning Family Foundation, we are now able to reconstruct the North Dependency according to Jefferson’s original plans.

Did you ever want to know more about what Martha Jefferson Randolph was like before she was the mother of eleven of Jefferson's grandchildren.

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.

Thomas Jefferson, just thirty-two at the time, was in Philadelphia serving on the Continental Congress when he sat down to write this letter to his brother-in-law Francis Eppes. On 26 June 1775 – after hearing the first reports of what would later become known as the Battle of Bunker Hill.

While Jefferson could not have foreseen the technological advances that have resulted in many environmental issues today, he does express his thoughts on intergenerational obligations and the earth in his famous Rights of Usufruct and Future Generations.

This year, the Restoration Department concluded their research into the design of Monticello’s original exterior “Venetian” blinds. The search ultimately led them from Monticello to the U.S. Capitol.

On May 22, 1957, Marilyn Monroe and her husband of less than a year, Arthur Miller, walked into Monticello, hoping to take a tour without anyone recognizing them. Unfortunately for them, their hopes were dashed almost immediately.

Winter at Monticello brings with it a solitary, clear beauty, with vistas that stretch for miles, but this pleasure was certainly tempered by the cold they endured.

Here at the Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, we spend most of our days reading Jefferson’s two-hundred-year-old mail. Jefferson wrote approximately 19,000 letters during his lifetime, so you can imagine how many more letters he also received! And that means we have a lot of different handwriting to navigate.

What gives spurious quotes away as "fakes." When we used to receive questions about these, we would often know right away that it wasn't a genuine excerpt from Jefferson's writings. How did we know?