Monticello Blog

A wood chip by itself is very modest. Small in size, light-weight, it could easily be lost or thrown away. Happily, the wood chip Thomas Jefferson cut from William Shakespeare’s chair during his 1786 trip to Stratford-upon-Avon comes with an explanatory note.

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.

Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of Jefferson’s plantsmanship was his use of microclimate – something that took nearly 170 years to fully appreciate.

Historian Jon Meacham, of History's new miniseries "Thomas Jefferson," explains why visiting Monticello is key to understanding the author of the Declaration of Independence and American history.

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?

After my freshman year at Georgetown University I returned to my hometown for a summer internship in the Education and Visitor Programs Department at Monticello.

Around 1811, Jefferson wrote a letter to his granddaughter Cornelia Jefferson Randolph, which contained a list of twelve “Canons of Conduct in Life” – rules to live by, in essence. In 1825 he sent the same list, minus two rules, to a baby boy named Thomas Jefferson Smith in response to a request from the child’s father.

I found something the other day which has turned out to be very interesting indeed.