Monticello Blog

I'm currently engaged in a long-term quest to acquire every single item in Frank Shuffelton's epic Thomas Jefferson: A Comprehensive, Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him, 1826-1997.

At least once every year I have the unpleasant task of having to tell someone that what they have got is not an original Jefferson document.

Back in the 1920s, when the nascent Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation (my current employer, now called the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., and not to be confused with the Monticello Association or the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association) was trying to scrape together the cash to purchase Monticello from Jefferson Monroe Levy, they found themselves a little short.

From the Reference Question files: “I’ve heard that Thomas Jefferson was a volunteer firefighter. Is this true?”

Maybe we don’t have Jefferson’s actual letters here at the Jefferson Library, but we have other cool stuff – oh yes we do! One perhaps less showy-cool but nonetheless important sort of thing we have here is books, correspondence, and research notes from a lot of the great Jefferson scholars.

In August of 1776, Jefferson purchased a mourning ring - but for whom did he buy it?

We are having some calamitous (for Virginia) weather lately - an astonishingly brutal winter altogether so far, in fact.

Everybody loves countdowns, right? Right. So, I’ve come up with my own list of things people get wrong about Jefferson, based on my extensive observation of the stuff people put on the Internet or ask us about.

I mean, it's complete twaddle, but it's deliciously twaddlesome.

With the coming of Thanksgiving comes also a burble of chatty news stories about the origins thereof, and usually something about turkeys. Not far behind comes some sort of mention of the Founding Fathers, and how they all felt about turkeys. I've seen several of these articles in the last few days and I don't know what else to think but that somebody out there has been working overtime, making up stories about Founding Fathers and turkeys.