Back in December my sister sent me a postcard from her visit to Jamestown, Virginia. Recently I got another postcard from her, this one from Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation near Charlottesville, Virginia.
To find out more, I checked out Monticello.org.
Here are 7 things I learned:
- Monticello was built between 1768 and 1808.
- There are 43 rooms in the entire structure.
- Jefferson grew at least 105 species of flowers in the extensive gardens.
- Monticello’s 8-acre “Fruitery” included an orchard, two vineyards, a nursery, “berry squares,” and “submural beds.” Here Jefferson experimented with 150 varieties of 31 species of fruit.
- Jefferson also treated his 2-acre vegetable garden as a laboratory, recording his findings in his “Garden Kalendar.”
- Because Jefferson died more than $107,000 in debt Monticello and its contents had to be sold.
- Today it is owned by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.
Thomas Jefferson must have been a fascinating person to know. If you want to learn more about him and/or the plantation, I highly recommend that you start with the website, which is bursting with information, photos, maps, FAQs, and parent/teacher resources. And of course you can find the details about visiting hours, tickets, and tours.
I was fortunate enough to visit Monticello a few years ago. There are some slave cottages still on the plantation. The southerners love to call their places “plantations” but to the blacks that means “slave owners”
It is certainly worth visiting.i loved the kitchen in a separate structure at the back of the house; separate because of the many fires which occurred in the kitchen and to keep the main house safe. The slaves had to carry the food across a courtyard to get it into the house -I suppose they had some means of keeping the food hot, especially in winter which is quite chilly in those parts.
Yes, slavery was certainly a big part of life at Monticello. I noticed that the Monticello website has lots of information on slavery, including lists of Enslaved People, Free Workmen, and Overseers who worked there.
I’m famous!
Also, I was really interested to hear that Jefferson checked and recorded the weather (including temperature and precipitation) every day, multiple times a day, for over fifty years! One of the discovery centers at Monticello had a screen set up with the current weather report compared with the weather for the same date at Monticello from one of the years Jefferson recorded it there. I thought that was a fun idea.
I like that idea, too. Jefferson was such a record-keeper!
No kidding! I like that about him. I also admire his autodidacticism. 🙂
This is very interesting and timely! I’ve been reading about Jefferson for schoolwork. The Monticello website is full of fascinating information.
Regarding Jefferson’s attitude toward slavery and how to treat the issue in the US Constitution that they were trying to draft in the early 1780s, one of the papers I read said that the question of freeing his own slaves was complicated by “a complex web of family relationships among them.” Then I read on the Monticello website that Jefferson was father of at least six children by his slave Sally Hemings. Complex relationships indeed!
I have the book The Hemingses of Monticello if you want to read/borrow it when you visit.