Monticello Blog

Our immediate goal was to make way for the first-ever electric lighting system for the area. But there was a much bigger historical payoff: evidence from this fieldwork and from a shovel-test-pit survey we conducted in 2018, reveals how Jefferson, relying on the labor of enslaved workers, sculpted the topography of the East Lawn, beginning in the late 1790s, in a radical transformation of the mountaintop landscape.

Before he was President, before he wrote the Declaration of Independence, before the American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson feared an invisible enemy.

Monticello has lost a magnificent friend, longtime Trustee (1994-2008), Honorary Trustee (2009-2020), and Summit member, Richard Gilder.

Just as the intoxicatingly fragrant hyacinth blossoms begin to fade, another colorful charmer pulls back the curtain and takes the stage: the tulip.

Jefferson’s “Belles of the Day” Begin

Today we at Monticello mourn the loss of one of our own: Joshua Scott, our Vice President for Development.

For many people enslaved in the United States, Christmas was the only holiday they ever knew.

Thomas Jefferson, being a meticulous record keeper, noted a consistent and nearly continuous record of weather observations at Monticello, his personal home. In 1807, Jefferson installed the compass rose to the ceiling of Monticello’s East Portico. The rose connected to a wind vane mounted on the roof and its rotation allowed Jefferson to record which direction the wind was blowing at any given time.

Archaeology is an historical discipline whose goals are to advance our understanding of what happened in the past and why. But unlike the documents on which historians rely -- think Jefferson's letters -- archaeological deposits do not come with dates. In archaeology, we have to do work for the dates that are essential for turning artifacts into history.

On February 5, 1769, Thomas Jefferson replied to his cousin’s request that his son study law under him. Writing from Shadwell, his boyhood home, Jefferson said he must decline: "I do not expect to be here more than two months in the whole between this and November next, at which time I propose to remove to another habitation which I am about to erect."