Monticello Blog

Remarks by Former U.S. Senator Jim Webb Founder’s Day Ceremony, April 11, 2014

Since November, Monticello’s archaeology team has been battling record cold and snow. We have excavated a 140-foot long trench running from the smokehouse in the South Dependency, across the Kitchen Yard and down to the vegetable garden terrace.

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.

In February 2014, Monticello hosted President Barack Obama and French President François Holland during a state visit.

Of all of the 2nd and 3rd floor spaces currently undergoing study, restoration, and re-interpretation at Monticello, the Nursery is the most complex as it requires extensive architectural restoration.

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.

Monticello has always been a work in progress, overflowing with Thomas Jefferson’s brilliance and complexity, his designs and experiments. For nearly a century, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation has worked step by step to restore Monticello and its signature mountaintop landscape to the period of Jefferson’s retirement.

At the southwestern end of Mulberry Row, Monticello’s principal plantation street, are the ruins of Jefferson’s ca. 1770 joiners’ shop. The shop was used by Jefferson’s free and enslaved carpenters to produce fine architectural woodwork and furniture until Jefferson’s death in 1826.

As a gentleman farmer, Thomas Jefferson was among the most forward thinking of his peers – he grew fruit trees grafted onto dwarfing rootstock, championed native species, imported European varieties, commissioned the Lewis and Clark Expedition for flora, and was the earliest American to reference garden plants widely found at nursery centers today. But perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of Jefferson’s plantsmanship was his use of microclimate – something that took nearly 170 years to fully appreciate.