Monticello Blog

Over the past several weeks, our ongoing archaeological excavations to advance the Kitchen Road Restoration Project have yielded several important discoveries. One of them is a greenstone cobble paving, which we suspect is the base of the Kitchen Path that connected the South Covered Passage to Mulberry Row and the terraced vegetable garden to the south.

On June 8, 2012, Smithsonian Gardens staff harvested beets, cabbage and turnips to be displayed as part of The Jefferson Table and Gillette Family Garden public program presented by the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) at the USDA Farmer’s Market.

This round of excavations has several goals. The first is to advance our understanding of how the Kitchen Road intersected with the Kitchen Path that once ran straight out the covered passage opening toward vegetable garden gate on Mulberry Row.

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.

Today, we take for granted the varieties of foods we can buy anytime of the year at our local super market. But what would happen if we had to eat locally? Meals especially desserts would take much more time.

Vegetable gardens are sprouting up everywhere, thanks to a renewed interest in fresh, locally-grown food that is sweeping across America.

Odelia Rasheed, 36, hadn’t planned to become an American.

This July 4th marks the 50th anniversary of the first naturalization ceremony held at Monticello. Kay Nimax, 77, will be there as around 80 men and women from across the globe will become American citizens on the West Lawn of Monticello on the nation’s birthday. Nimax has made a point to celebrate Monticello’s significant naturalization ceremony anniversaries.

The historic rose collections at the Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants, established over twenty years ago, continue to expand and generate interest among rose lovers.

Earlier this year, Monticello's archaeology team located the remains of a previously undocumented building on Mulberry Row. The new find consists of a brick paving that served as the floor of a log structure whose walls have left no visible trace.