Fueling Discoveries

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, which allowed curators to commission accurate reproductions for the newly-restored kitchen.

"The cook which I had in Washington (mr Julien) and who is now with me for a time, informs me you made for the President’s kitchen some irons of casting for the stoves or stew-holes in the kitchen, in which the box-part & the grille1 or bars were all solid together, and that you made them of three sizes. I must ask the favor of you to make 8. for me" - Thomas Jefferson to Henry Foxall, 24 March 1809 

from The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, vol. 1, 4 March 1809 to 15 November 1809, ed. J. Jefferson Looney. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004, pp. 76–77.

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Stew stoves with iron grates in newly restored kitchen space. Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

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.

Stew stoves were the historic equivalent of modern-day cooktops, allowing cooks more precise control over the heat required to prepare dishes in the French style.

Image: Excavated stew stoves, South Pavillion, 2017. Monticello Archaeology Department.

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.

Images:

Left: Excerpt from Diane Ehrenpreis and Endrina Tay. “Enlightened Networks: Thomas Jefferson’s System for Working from Home.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 110, no. 2 (2022): 197–218.

Top right: Jefferson's Library at Monticello, ca. 1993. TJF Archives.

Bottom right: Jefferson's Library and private suite after reinterpretation, 2022. 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. Photo credit: Gavin Ashworth.

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.

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 this 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.

Image: South Wing exhibit, 2018. Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

The first gathering held by the Getting Word project was held in the summer of 1997. In this photograph, historian Lucia (Cinder) Stanton (seated, far left) speaks with descendants of Monticello’s enslaved community.

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 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.

Image: Black & white group photo from Community Gathering, 7/13-15/97, Getting Word Photo Album 1 ("The Beginning")

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 tour script, possibly from the 1930s,  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.

Image: Handwritten tour script, not dated, likely 1930s. Thomas Jefferson Foundation Archives.

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.

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.

In his letter, Thomas Jefferson briefly related to his daughter Martha that his enslaved butler, Burwell Colbert, fell ill while they were staying at Poplar Forest, Jefferson’s Bedford county retreat.

Jefferson’s granddaughter Ellen wrote to her mother and provided a much more detailed description of Colbert’s illness, as well as her grandfather’s emotional state. These details were not apparent in Jefferson’s own letter.

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 – Getting Word, transcript p. 80

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

Image: Guide giving a tour on Plantation Community Weekend, 17-18 July 1993. Thomas Jefferson Foundation Archives

Return to the main exhibit: Enlighten the People