Monticello Blog

Damaged Copper Cookware Imperils French-Style Cuisine at Monticello, 11 July 1824

In 1786, Thomas Jefferson took a serious fall in Paris, dislocating and possibly breaking his right wrist. The injury healed slowly, and though he regained use, stiffness and pain in his joint troubled him as he aged.

During an annual inspection of Monticello, we noticed that the material that has been used to fill cracks on several of the wooden panels surrounding Monticello’s main floor doorways is failing in some areas.

Thomas Jefferson returns to the mountaintop.

Last week archaeologists began test excavations at an early-19th-century stone house at Tufton, one of the four quarter farms that comprised Monticello Plantation.

While historians have been quick to highlight the national reasons for Jefferson’s vocal support for the admission of Missouri, the situation at Monticello that shaped his thinking has been largely overlooked. In September 1819, Jefferson had agreed to be guarantor of two $10,000 loans for his friend Wilson Cary Nicholas, who promptly died the following year.

Our staff installed a CoolBot walk-in refrigerator at the Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants (CHP), which affords us more space for seed storage and allows for better seed control under a constant temperature and humidity threshold (cold and dry conditions are preferred for most of the CHP and Monticello seed lines).

In recognition of Presidents' Day and Black History Month, CBS This Morning aired a story about the connection between Thomas Jefferson's descendants through his wife, Martha, and his descendants through Sally Hemings.

Two centuries ago, on February 13, 1819, James Tallmadge, a member of the Democratic-Republican Party formed by Thomas Jefferson, offered an amendment to a bill regarding the admission of the Territory of Missouri into the United States. The so-called Tallmadge Amendment proposed banning further imports of slaves into the future state, as well as the gradual emancipation of those already in the territory. What should have been a simple decision on the future of Missouri, however, soon became a debate on the future of