Monticello Blog

Before the era of Wii’s, Twitter, and Netflix, the Jefferson family entertained themselves with music, reading aloud, or scientific inquiry. As part of an ongoing campaign to restore Monticello’s interiors, curators recently acquired an air pump similar to Jefferson’s lost original.

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, where he visited the shop of James Newhall and purchased what was perhaps his first and only pair of “ready-made” shoes. Unfortunately, they didn’t fit and Jefferson returned them with a somewhat exasperated note that got me to wondering: where did most people get their shoes, what did those shoes look like, and who made them?

Sometimes a good tree gets planted in what turns out to be a bad location. That’s exactly what an engineer recently discovered near Monticello’s South Wing.

“Memories Matter,” a Black History Month program sponsored jointly by Monticello and the Jefferson School in Charlottesville, paired local experts with people eager to learn how to protect and preserve decades-old family artifacts.

Williams and Johnson recalled several stories during their recent interview for Getting Word, the oral history project documenting memories of descendants of Monticello’s enslaved community. Just a few weeks earlier, they had learned that they are descendants of Peter Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved cook and brewer, and an older brother of Sally Hemings.

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.

An overview of excavations at the Stone Stable on Mulberry Row prior to restoration work.

Water supply to Monticello, the mountaintop home of Thomas Jefferson, has been a perpetual problem since its construction.

How do you locate evidence for missing curtain hardware two hundred years after it was removed? Science! The Restoration Department recently used four different techniques to locate evidence for curtain hardware.