In The Beginning

From its creation in 1923, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates Monticello, has always placed great emphasis on scholarship. From the 1920s through the mid-1950s, Fiske and Marie Kimball (chairman of Monticello's restoration committee and its first curator, respectively) were well-known for their meticulous documentary research. Their successor, James A. Bear, Jr. (Monticello's first full-time curator), spent decades compiling and transcribing sources into his famous "black notebooks," including visitor accounts, chronologies, unpublished letters, and land records.

In 1985, Virginia Commonwealth University professor Daniel P. Jordan took up the Director's mantle. Under Jordan, Monticello expanded its vision of what a historic house site could be. He advanced the scholarly program that led to the establishment of the ICJS at Kenwood in 1994, under a co-operative agreement with the University of Virginia. ICJS grew to include research, archaeology, education, scholarly programs, publications, the Getting Word African-American Oral History Project, the Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, the Jefferson Library, and DAACS.

“. . . we're going to try to tell the most honest story we can about Jefferson and slavery and race and the plantation, and it's all going to be based on serious scholarship." - Daniel P. Jordan

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Photo of Daniel P. Jordan, ca. 1986. Thomas Jefferson Foundation Special Collections and Archives.

In the Beginning

Located on 78 acres of land that was once part of Jefferson’s holdings, Kenwood house was built between 1939-1941 by Major General Edwin “Pa” Watson and his wife, Frances Nash Watson. Following General Watson’s death in 1945, Mrs. Watson continued to live at Kenwood with her niece Ellen “Enie” Nash. Enie was one of the first women to graduate with a law degree from the University of Virginia, and served on Charlottesville’s city council. After her aunt’s death in 1971, she lived at Kenwood, later relocating to the adjacent Roosevelt Cottage. She died in 1995.

Francis Nash Watson bequeathed Kenwood to the University of Virginia in 1970, which in turn leased the property to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in 1992. Today, Kenwood is home to ICJS, and includes the 15,500 square-foot Jefferson Library dedicated in 2002.

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Photo of Kenwood, ca. 1960s. Thomas Jefferson Foundation Special Collections and Archives.

In the Beginning

In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed into law a bill to create the Thomas Jefferson Commemorative Coin to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Jefferson’s birth. The coin created by the U.S. Mint sold out in four weeks, and a portion of the proceeds raised $5 million for “The Jefferson Moment” capital campaign and for ICJS.

In 2004, ICJS was renamed to the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies in recognition of a $15 million gift by Robert H.  and Clarice Smith to endow the Center in perpetuity.

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Left: Thomas Jefferson 250th Anniversary Silver Dollar Coin, Thomas Jefferson Foundation Special Collections and Archives.

Right: Robert H. and Clarice Smith, April 2009, Thomas Jefferson Foundation Special Collections and Archives.

In the Beginning

The dedication of the new International Center for Jefferson Studies in November 1995 was attended by many friends and supporters. Over the years, an Advisory Board of acclaimed scholars have helped guide the Center’s activities.

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Photo of ICJS dedication, 1995. From left to right: Ruhi Ramazani, Garry Wills, Noble Cunningham, Charles Cullen, Erika Gentry, Merrill Peterson, Douglas Wilson, and Peter Onuf. Events Photos, 1923-2008, TJF94. Thomas Jefferson Special Collections and Archives.

Fueling Discoveries

Learning about the past is an enterprise that never ends, and the departments of ICJS have and continue to fuel new discoveries that support the ongoing work of the Foundation. Monticello strives to present an accurate, honest, and complete history, and ICJS staff play an integral part in helping Monticello to meet that challenge.

The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series project (PTJ:RS), which began in 1999 in partnership with the Papers of Thomas Jefferson based at Princeton University, aims to make available Thomas Jefferson's complete retirement-era (1809-1826) correspondence, much of which has never been 
published. These documents have in turn contributed to the work of other departments at Monticello.

In their very first volume, published in 2004, PTJ:RS editors brought to light a document that provided a detailed description of some of the ironwork in Monticello's kitchen. In this letter to Washington iron founder Henry Foxall, Jefferson described the form and number of iron grates he needed for his stew stoves in the kitchen at Monticello.

While our documentary editors are making discoveries about Monticello in 200-year old documents, Monticello’s archaeologists are studying the past from the ground up. In 2017, archaeologists discovered the remains of a stew stove inside the South Pavilion kitchen– an earlier version of the reconstructed stew stoves visitors now see in the 1809 kitchen.

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A Monticello archaeologist working on the excavated stoves, South Pavilion, 2017. Courtesy of the Archaeology Department, Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

Fueling Discoveries

Opened in 2002, the Jefferson Library, provides access to research resources and assistance to staff across the Foundation. Library staff also pursue their own research. Fiske and Marie Kimball Librarian Endrina Tay’s collaboration with her curatorial colleague Diane Ehrenpreis resulted in a new understanding of how Thomas Jefferson organized and stored his vast collection of books and paper, and transformed Monticello’s interpretation of Jefferson’s private suite in 2018.

Jefferson designed and commissioned special furniture like his octagonal writing table and his pupitre en cartonnier (2019 reproduction pictured behind the octagonal desk) to manage his incoming and outgoing correspondence.

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Fueling Discoveries

In the last 50 years, our understanding and interpretation of the Monticello enslaved community has been transformed. The story of Sally Hemings and her relationship with Thomas Jefferson is emblematic of this change. From the earliest research by James Bear and Cinder Stanton in the 1970s and 80s, to Monticello’s formal acknowledgement of the relationship in its 2000 DNA report, Sally Hemings and her children are now an integral part of Monticello’s interpretative efforts.

In 1998, Dr. Eugene Foster announced that the DNA tests he had performed showed a genetic relationship between the Hemings family and the Jefferson male line. In response, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation gathered a committee to investigate the question of Jefferson’s paternity, and announced their own results in a 2000 report:

"The DNA study, combined with multiple strands of currently available documentary and statistical evidence, indicates a high probability that Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings, and that he most likely was the father of all six of Sally Hemings's children appearing in Jefferson’s records."

In 2018, Monticello opened a new exhibit in the South Wing of Monticello’s dependencies, telling the story of Sally Hemings, her children with Thomas Jefferson, and their descendants.

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South Wing Exhibit ca. 2018. Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

Fueling Discoveries

The Hemings family oral history of their descent from Thomas Jefferson was not well accepted at Monticello or among most historians prior to the late 1990s, but historian Lucia (Cinder) Stanton’s work with her colleague Dianne Swann-Wright in the Getting Word African American Oral History Project helped to change minds on this topic, including her own.

"I had questions before that, but I always was such a fan of Ellen Coolidge, that I couldn't give up her point of view for a long time. That it was unthinkable that her grandfather would be conducting this connection while in the midst of the family. And that made sense to me for a long time. But then once I began reading Madison Hemings and … what he said, and he sounded so honest and compelling, and of course, talking to the descendants who were not making a big thing about who their ancestors were, but just stating it as fact through the families’ stories." - Cinder Stanton Oral History Interview, 9 August 2023.

The first gathering held by the Getting Word project was held in the summer of 1997. In this photo, Stanton speaks with descendants of Monticello’s enslaved community.

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Community Gathering Photograph, July 1997. Getting Word African American History Project Archives, Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

Expanding Our Focus

In earlier decades, much of the Foundation’s time and effort was spent on Jefferson himself and the Monticello house and furnishings. Today, the ICJS has helped to expand our interpretive focus. Our research encompasses the entire mountaintop and beyond; residents of Monticello, enslaved and free, and their descendants. ICJS’s conferences and fellowships give support to the study of the broader British Atlantic world and its legacies. 

This undated script illustrates the typical content of tours in Monticello’s early years, which almost exclusively focused on either Jefferson himself or the mansion’s interior furnishings.

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Undated tour script. Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Early History. Thomas Jefferson Foundation Special Collections and Archives.

Expanding Our Focus

Monticello’s Archaeology department is literally expanding the Foundation’s focus from the house and wings to the wider mountaintop and beyond; and from Thomas Jefferson to all the residents of the plantation, particularly enslaved laborers. Archaeology’s Plantation Survey is a multi-year effort to locate archaeological sites across 2,500 acres that the Thomas Jefferson Foundation owns. This is done by digging shovel test pits (STPs) at regular intervals. When artifacts are found, the intervals are tightened to increase the chance of establishing the boundary of a site. In many ways, this process can provide a more complete and accurate picture of what was happening at Monticello and its quarter farms than the documentary record can. To date, over 16,000 STPs have been excavated on the Monticello Home Farm, revealing over 40 domestic, agricultural, pre-contact, and post-Jefferson sites.

This sherd was discovered during the Plantation Survey at an area referred to as Site 6, located approximately half a mile southeast of the main house, and 
occupied by enslaved agricultural workers between c.1800 and 1830. Like nearly all quarter sites off the mountaintop, there was no documentary record of it—archaeology has not only revealed the location and occupation dates of this site, but also socioeconomic differences between households within the enslaved community at Monticello.

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Shell-edge pearlware sherd, Archaeology Department, Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

Expanding Our Focus

The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series editorial team is not only bringing to light Jefferson documents that have never before been published, they are also bringing new perspectives to the study of Monticello and the early 19th century South through the Family Letters Project (FLP). The FLP is a digital project containing transcriptions of letters between members of Jefferson’s extended family, which often provide details and a richer context to events than was previously available.

For example, we can compare two letters from July 1819 describing the illness of Burwell Colbert, an enslaved butler to the Jefferson and Randolph families. In his letter, Thomas Jefferson briefly mentioned to his daughter Martha that Colbert, fell ill while they were staying at Poplar Forest, Jefferson’s Bedford county retreat: "we have been near losing Burwell by a stricture of the upper bowels; but he has got about again and is now only very weak"

Jefferson’s granddaughter Ellen wrote to her mother on the same day. Ellen provided a much longer and more detailed description of Colbert’s illness. The paragraph, which "With all my wishes" takes up nearly half of her letter. She recounted the actions of the family and the doctor who treated Colbert, and described her grandfather's emotional state. None of these details were evident in Jefferson's letter; they give us a better understanding of the event than we would get from Jefferson's letter alone.

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Detail of “Thomas Jefferson to Martha Jefferson Randolph, 28 July [1819],” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-14-02-0539, with detail of "Ellen W. Randolph to MJR, 28 July 1819," Jefferson Quotes and Family Letters, https://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/823. 

Expanding Our Focus

The Getting Word African American Oral History Project has allowed us to tell a more complete story of Monticello through the voices of the enslaved community and their descendants. In particular, the story of Peter Fossett has served as a focal point in our interpretation of slavery since it was pieced together by historian Cinder Stanton. Fossett was born into slavery at Monticello, separated from his family in the dispersal sales after Jefferson’s death in 1826, reunited with them as an adult, and returned to Monticello as an old man at the turn of the 20th century.

"it was wonderful that all this was happening at once because there was an immediate destination for what we were learning in the plantation community tours. And they really leapt on particularly the Fossett story, using Peter Fossett as the centerpiece for what they talked about. " - Cinder Stanton, Oral History Interview

The stories of enslaved community members, including Peter Fossett, were a key feature of the Plantation Community Weekend special tours.

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A guide giving tour on Plantation Community Weekend, 17-18 July 1993. Thomas Jefferson Foundation Special Collections and Archives.

Spreading the Word

ICJS’s programs have not only supported the work of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. They have influenced and supported the work of staff at other historic sites, members of the scholarly community, and members of the general public. Monticello has hosted a variety of educational events and programs for decades; many of them were hosted under the umbrella of ICJS after its creation in 1994.

The long-running "Jefferson and Monticello" course provided members of the general public an opportunity to learn about Jefferson and his world through 8 sessions taught by Monticello staff, offered through a partnership with the University of Virginia’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies.

The "Straticello" seminar for K-12 educators was jointly sponsored by Monticello and Stratford Hall from 1985 to 2008. After 1994 it became part of ICJS’s portfolio.

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Group photo of Straticello participants at Monticello, 1994. Thomas Jefferson Foundation Special Collections and Archives.

Spreading the Word

Monticello’s Archaeology Department is also home to the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS), an ambitious initiative that uses digital technologies to foster archaeological data sharing and collaboration among scholars, helping to advance our understanding of the evolution of slave societies in the early modern Atlantic.

Over the last 24 years, thanks to funding from organizations such as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, DAACS has grown into the largest and longest-running archive of downloadable, comparable archaeological data for any specific region or period. A critical component of this work is training and supporting a large network of archaeologists and historians who use material culture to conduct research on the experiences of enslaved communities and their descendants in the Southeastern United States and the Caribbean.

DAACS Summer Institute Fellows and interns learn DAACS identification, measurement skills and protocols. Graduate students, junior scholars, senior scholars, and DAACS staff learn together and from one another. The DAACS Summer Institute at Monticello in 2022 included 17 fellows, 6 interns, DAACS staff, 
and visiting lecturers from across North America and the Caribbean. 

In this photo, Senior Archaeological Analyst Dr. Lindsay Bloch works with DAACS Fellow Simone Muhammad (California State University, Fullerton) to identify different types of Afro-Caribbean ware from the Estate Little Princess site located on the island of St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands.

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DAACS Summer Institute, 2023. Archaeology Department. Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

Spreading the Word

Under Saunders Director Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy (2003-2022), the ICJS’s international reach experienced a major expansion. To date, the ICJS has hosted over 500 domestic and international scholars from the United States, and 32 countries around the world. Our fellowships have supported not only academic historians and graduate students, but novelists, archaeologists, artists, librarians, journalists, musicians, and more.

This map shows the geographic origins of all of ICJS’s fellows, illustrating the worldwide reach of our fellowship programs.

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Jefferson Library, Visualization of ICJS Fellowships 1994-2024, created with Tableau, 2024.

Spreading the Word

The work of ICJS departments is continually fueling new scholarship and discoveries, providing more and richer resources to understand Monticello and our shared history.

"The Family Letters Digital Archive – overseen by Lisa Francavilla, Retirement Series editor J. Jefferson Looney, and others at the International Center for Jefferson Studies – is a boon to scholars, students and anyone else who is interested in Martha Jefferson Randolph and her extended circle of family and friends." - Cynthia A. Kierner, author of Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello: Her Life and Times

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Cover of Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello: Her Life and Times (University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

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