Guide: This home is a wonderful example of what they call vernacular architecture, which means if you generally go outside of the southern Maryland area you’re not going to find any homes built like this. It was actually built around 1770 and it’s a great example of a kind of home that the lower middling sort would have lived in. One architectural historian said it is not the kind of house that you would find on a house and garden tour, nor are you going to find chatty hostesses with artfully-arranged flower vases. Spinning wool was the one thing that they would do, process all the wool and actually knit things from it, which is great. To go from, you know, A to Z. And just about everything that we have in here is all based on a lot of inventory analysis. Head of household dies, people come through, they take a true and just inventory of everything that they owned, assigned a value to it, and that was for the purpose of settling debt. They are not the end all and be all of what people owned. But when you go through '54 you start seeing trends and so it’s those trends that we followed when setting up this room. You’ll notice that they have a looking glass, but not enough people had basins or razors to justify putting them in the house. Glass had to be imported and glass things could be relatively expensive, so to just have a looking glass and nothing else to go with it is sort of a little status symbol. The only thing that separated the small landowner from the tenant farmer was the fact that small landowners actually owned their lands and more importantly they owned at least one or two slaves. All slaves of families of this wealth level, male or female, were field slaves and they would be right outside the field alongside the master of the farm or the plantation doing the work. From day one, we had to be able to address the idea of slavery because otherwise you just come here and you’d think that it was just your typical colonial family living off the land doing everything themselves. The family that we're based on had Kate Sharper and her young son, John. John was probably ten pounds sterling and with that low amount, that probably puts him around eight years old. Kate was probably 37 pounds sterling. She probably came with Mrs. Bolton as part of her dowry; basically made Mrs. Bolton marriable, that she came with a slave or one of these, a bed. Sometimes bedsteads in inventories that we read are worth more than what the family brought in in a year on tobacco. The pillows, the pillowcases, the bolster, the counterpane, all that factors into the value of the bed and all that is imported. Biggest misconception about colonial people is this whole idea of self-sufficiency. They grew their food and that’s it. But make no mistake, they had access to a foreign market and they loved it. There was one study that came out and the conclusion was basically that the last thing that they would put money into was the house itself. They would put money in things to put in the house. They would put money into maybe building a corn house or a milk house and the reason for that is you’re basically showing your mastery of the agricultural endeavor, advertising your success. The same thing with the brick chimney. Reason why a family like this would have a brick chimney was basically they were showing off to anybody that was going by. And if you can imagine that you spend most of your time out in the fields working and dealing mostly with your family, to have somebody come through from England or France or whatnot, man, you wanted to show off. You wanted to talk to them. You wanted to feed them and that’s what people commonly did. A traveler through Virginia in the 1750s wrote in his diary that one was much more likely to find lodging and victuals at houses where brick chimbles showed then elsewhere.

Guide: In the 18th century this would be step one. They would always want to add more to it. They would always want to turn the upstairs into a place to live for rooms and things like that.

Teacher 1: Just like we do.

Guide: Exactly! Does anybody have any questions? Yes?

Teacher 2: Like, do people write about oppressive heat—

Guide: Oh, yeah!

Teacher 2: 'Cause I feel like that’s the main topic on the news every time you turn it on.

Guide: They did all the time. And the great thing was that—

Teacher 2: How did they deal with that?

Guide: They would go on and on.

Teacher 2: Sort of like they do now.

Guide: They weren’t foolish about it. At midday they would come in from the fields for about three hours and then they would go back out when it wasn’t that hot. You know only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun.

Teacher 1: Can you talk about the doorways being so small?

Guide: Yes! It’s not because they were short. They’ve been here for over a hundred years, the diet has improved, they’ve acclimated to it. The doorways are small to keep heat in. We know within two years of being built that the walls and these exposed ceiling beams were covered in soot from the constant smoky haze that was in here during the winter time when they were burning 30 to 40 cords a winter to keep warm.

Colonial people generally didn’t bathe that often; they thought it was actually bad for you, it washed the essential oils off your body. They did laundry maybe once a week. You could have anywhere from two to 15 people living in here. That’s just the way it was. And so this idea of sitting around and doing cutesy little things, it’s like, no, they were actively involved in everything that went into farming this land and becoming a success.

The kitchen is often where the family’s slave would have slept in here with her young son John. But there’s absolutely no reason to believe that they also might not have allowed her to just simply sleep in the house with the rest of the family. That happened from time to time.

Sometimes if you’re a house museum you focus on the house, the things that are in the house, the stories that involve the house, but a lot of times one of the things that they forget about is the farm that the house actually existed on. And believe it or not, more and more house museums now are resurrecting the farms simply because, you know, you might as well bring the farm to life because it’s a much more complete picture.

Travelers even when they went to the homes of the very, very wealthy and looked at their gardens said that they were ugly. You know, that they paled in the comparison to what was going on in England. If you were spending the lion's share of your time out in the field cultivating tobacco, you do not have time for a fancy pretty garden. Mounds of earth with pumpkin, squash, and beans in it are sometimes all that the gardens consisted of. We've got a few more things 'cause we’re not that far down the totem pole.

Teacher 1: I know this is all colonial but the Piscataway that lived around here, they did, like, the Three Sisters?

Guide: They did.

Teacher 1: Do you have any Three Sisters?

Guide: We do very little Three Sisters simply because it’s never worked for us. Most everything that we grow in here are all heirlooms. Many 18th-century varieties of vegetables have gone the way of the dodo, they simply don’t exist, too many hybrids now, but they wrote so extensively about things and described them in such detail that the things that aren’t 18th century are things that most closely resemble them.

Most of the things on the borders are going to be your medicinals, such as that white flowered thing growing there is called Feverfew. Pretty much tells you everything about it. The red Wethersfields that are in there closely resemble another variety. Melons, these are called Anne Arundel melons just because they figure prominently in Peale family still lifes. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, one of my favorite colonial names, said, and I quote, “We are very deficient in our gardens for we have neither time nor taste. Besides the labor is too dear."

Guide: These fences only were used on farms. And of course the reason why colonial planters and farmers had these fences was to keep animals out, not to pen them in. English travelers happened to say in their diaries, when they looked at the way the colonial people were 'farming' in general, was they just wrote about the deplorable way in which they treated their animals, doing nothing with them, just turning them loose. No management, no skill, no nothing.

But this is what life here demanded from them. And the number one reason for that was tobacco. In April, they would plant their corn. And then May was time for planting tobacco. Once the tobacco's in the ground, they don't do anything with the corn any more.

So if you come at a certain point of the year, you'll see tobacco growing in the field, corn growing in the field, but there'll be weeds up all around it and people will be like, oh my gosh, what is that? And it challenges the way that they think that a field should look, that everything should be, you know, clean and precise. But that wouldn't be an accurate representation of the way that they did it.

They weren't thrilled with it. They didn't think that this was the bee's knees, this way of farming. It's not—it doesn't take a lot of this, it takes a lot of this. The difference between curing, which they called an art, and farming it, is that curing was all up here.

You harvest something, the agricultural year is over. Harvest corn, done. Harvest wheat, done. But cut tobacco, it's followed on almost immediately by the process of curing it. And your reputation was joined with this, because everybody's going to know what price your tobacco got. Is it too wet? Is it too dry? If it's too wet, sometimes they thought that they might have to light fires in here. But if you light a fire in here, that's going to flavor it, which means you're going to get less of a price. What do I do, what do I do, what do I do. Will you be known as a miserable planter? Will you be known as a crop master? Because if you mess this up, all that work that you did, out in the field is going to be for naught.

When you cut the tobacco, you want to leave it outside for about four or five days to kill it. That's the term that they use. Then you would bring it into the barn, you would stake it, stack it, and store it. Once it was cured, they would prize it, or press it, in these hogsheads. And then the hogsheads would be taken to the town of Piscataway over here, and the inspector would break it open, he would pull out the tobacco, and anything that he deemed trash was burned right there on the dock.

England loved Virginia sweet-scented tobacco. They loved it. The soil and the climate around the James and York Rivers was so different that the tobacco took on this sweet-scented variety that England prized. After the French War, the French and Indian War, it was widely known that Colonel Washington, when he took up residence at Mount Vernon was very desirous to be a successful tobacco planter. That's what Virginians did. That is what your reputation is, that's how you define yourself, by the kind of tobacco planter you are.

He was an absolute failure at it. He was not a bad planter. Maryland's soils have always been known as stiff, which is a reference to the amount of clay in here. So the tobacco took on this much more robust flavor. Where is Mount Vernon? Right across the river. He shared our soils. He tried for 10 years before he finally quit. That shows you just how important it was to everyone's reputation that they be successful at it, and show good judgment in their ability to master and command their environment.

Elizabeth V. Chew: This visitor center facility opened in 2009 and it has radically improved our ability both orient our visitors to just explain to them why Jefferson is important and so, why they're here, and to engage and educate.

This exhibition is really one of four that's in the building. This is the largest one, it's the one that is intended to put the house, which is the one piece of Monticello that mostly everybody sees, in the context of Monticello writ large, Monticello as a 5,000-acre working plantation.

If you look up at this light pencil drawing on the banner here, you can see the view that the young Jefferson would have seen from Shadwell, looking over across the Rivanna River, the little low mountain in the front here is Monticello. The high mountain behind Monticello is the mountain that Jefferson called Mountalto, and he bought—he bought what he could see from his mountain of that mountain in the 1770s. And so, as a boy, the little mountain just drew him and he had a dream of living there as an adult when he was a teenager. And that would have been the least practical place you could ever live. In a time when the river was a major means of transportation, where getting around was difficult at any time, where water was a constant problem and need, to live on a mountain made no sense. He really elevated ideals over being practical, over practicality.

The central section in the middle of the room here goes through and gives examples of Jefferson's just complete and total dedication to doing what he would call gathering, recording, and sharing and disseminating this idea of useful knowledge, whether it was related to science, to farming, to government, to transportation, to what you could and couldn't grow somewhere. He was interested in really every point of knowledge on the human spectrum. And nothing—there was almost nothing that was too small for his attention.

We have several really fun kind of interactive elements in the exhibition, and this one uses Jefferson's travels, both in North America and in Europe, and it shows people what, when Jefferson was traveling, what he was doing, and he said it himself, that he was gathering ideas that would be useful—'useful'—back in this country. So what we do is follow his travels—and I'm looking at southern France right here—and we talk about everywhere he went, what he was looking at.

So here we are: viticulture or wine-growing in the Burgundy region of France, or ancient architecture in Orange, France. He was also completely obsessed with the idea of people in this country growing olives. He thought that olive oil was going to be the new revolution and that the rice planters in Southern Carolina should stop growing rice and grow olive trees. And he really worked hard to convince them of that. Really, he's so interested in these little details of things that he thinks are going to help him come back here, share the ideas, and even put them to use himself.

So, this is a fun way, and, all as you all know way better than I do, young people love this kind of thing.

Elizabeth V. Chew: So I've talked about how the center is about his dedication to all this gathering and sharing and disseminating. This short wall here is dedicated to a horizontal look across the social spectrum at Monticello. Because we obviously know that Jefferson and his elite family in their 'big house,' they're the tip of the pyramid here, but obviously everything that happens that makes his household run, that makes his cash crops grow, is done by the labor of enslaved people.

So we also look across the spectrum of the enslaved community at people working in the fields versus enslaved people who work in the house or in the [?] industries, and we compare those also to hired white people. There were some hired white workers here who did things like, well, build a house, for one thing, or serve as blacksmiths or certain kinds of carpenters. They also trained enslaved people to do these kinds of jobs.

We've learned an amazing amount about the lives of enslaved people all over the plantation. So, what we know is that enslaved people owned material goods. We tend to have a notion of slavery, I think, or at least I used to, as being very fixed and abstract and this big box of awfulness and yes, it is that. But you can also come to understand it in a much more textured way where you see—we know a great deal about the names and activities and lives of the individual people who lived here in slavery and what happened to their descendants. And that combination of Jefferson's record keeping, archaeology, other kinds of written records, and then genealogy and oral history that we've been doing here for 40 years.

So we know that people who worked in the fields owned the same kinds of really fashionable tablewares that slaves who worked in the house and lived up on the mountain owned and that, in many cases, are the same kinds of things being used in the big house. Slaves had several different ways of making money. Jefferson preferred to give cash incentives to slaves rather than use harsh physical punishment, so some skilled slaves received cash money. Slaves also kept poultry yards and gardens on their own time and sold the products of those, both to the big house and sometimes in markets in towns. Slaves were paid by Jefferson for doing particularly onerous jobs like cleaning out the sewers underneath the privies, and slaves were given tips by visitors quite routinely. So with the money that people here in slavery owned, we know that they went into town on Sundays and shopped in stores. Scholars have studied shopkeepers' ledger books and found that there are records of slaves coming in and buying things.

So what we see here, I think, is examples of how enslaved people survived in a system that denied them their basic humanity. We see how people figured out ways to just get through it. And we see families over generations here whose descendants go on actually to be very involved in all kinds of work towards emancipation and later civil rights.

Elizabeth V. Chew: On the wall here behind you, we break down Monticello into four areas. We look at gardens, agriculture, plantation industries, and the house. And my interest here was making it all on the same plane. Often we tend to privilege the house over everything else. I think Jefferson saw it as being all of a piece.

So we look at how he puts what he considers to be this useful knowledge to work, in all aspects of his operations here, whether it's what he grew in the garden, his attempts to grow grapes to make wine, his intense interest in the technology of agriculture. For example, he himself invented a kind of plow moldboard. People think of him as being an inventor. He was mostly a creative adapter because of all these things he learned about, wrote down, and then later used here at Monticello. The one thing that he ever truly invented was a plow moldboard. And we have a recreation plow right here that shows this curved—it's the curvy wood part that sort of turns over the soil once it's cut by the metal blade. So he had witnessed people plowing in France that he thought were really inefficient, and he has this geometric idea for the shape of a moldboard that will do a better job with less resistance in turning over the ground. So he has this plow made here at Monticello and he writes to all of his people all over the world to tell them about it. Even though he won several awards for it, it was never really widely adopted.

The Garden Book is really a bravura demonstration of his record keeping interests. Let's see. We have a little facsimile of it right here, and it's really hard to see, but he basically—he started it as a young man still living at Shadwell. After his retirement here in 1809, he really does it every single year in earnest, where he writes down, keeps a chart where he writes down everything he plants and when, when it sprouts, how it does, and then eventually 'when it comes to table,' which means when they get to eat it in the house, and when it goes to seed. And he does this every year for over 20 years. He doesn't care if something doesn't do well, he just tries something else. His interest is really in what will grow well in this particular climate here in Albemarle County, Virginia. He wants to know what he can grow here that will be useful. So things like benne or sesame, he grows that. These hot peppers a friend in Texas sends him. There are a number of examples of things that people send him that he tries to grow. He really really really wants to grow wine grapes, but he never can. He would actually love the fact that wine is such a big deal now in Virginia.

So even though he has this amazingly gorgeous, 1,000-foot-long garden, we know for a fact that this garden was not primarily meant to furnish the table. We know that because from the beginning to the end of Jefferson's life at Monticello, we have record books kept by the women of his family, the white women of his family, recording purchases of large quantities of garden produce from slaves, and this is one of them right here. So Jefferson's garden was mostly a laboratory and an experiment. If something came to the table, that was great, but they were not relying on it. They had this very good backup plan that they had to use almost every week.

Jacqueline Langholtz: Tell me more about yourselves and what, when you woke up this morning or heard about this trip two weeks ago, you wanted to take away from it.

Teacher 1: Well, I teach fifth grade, so it's mostly U.S. geography, that's the emphasis for our course, so—

Teacher 2: Westward expansion?

Teacher 1: Yes, that's really—

Jacqueline Langholtz: Okay, so Lewis and Clark's why you're here? Great, okay.

Teacher 1: Especially the scientific discoveries and we're putting more of a science emphasis on the flora and fauna of different areas, too. So what their findings were and also what they found—yeah, I think it'll be very helpful.

Jacqueline Langholtz: Wonderful. Great.

Teacher 2: Is there information on the relationship with Jefferson or his time period with the Native Americans, because that's one of the things that we try to do as we move from region to region is that Native American element of that region.

Jacqueline Langholtz: Yeah. Yeah. So the question was the relationship that Jefferson specifically had with Virginia Indians?

Teacher 2: And his contemporaries.

Jacqueline Langholtz: And his contemporaries. Okay. Jefferson's own and only self-published book, his own book, Notes on the State of Virginia, would probably be a good resource and that's a primary resource there. That's a field that I think people are really just beginning to explore and learn more about, and I think you'll hear some different opinions about, what did that really honestly look like, and I think you'll see a lot more scholarship about that coming out, I hope so.

Teacher: Do you think that it was typical what Jefferson had here, was that a typical economy for a plantation in the South?

Elizabeth V. Chew: No. You mean the slaves—

Teacher: What you found in the—

Elizabeth V. Chew: Oh, yes, I do. Yes, I do, actually. I think Jefferson was unusual in what he said he wanted here was to use things like work incentives and not harsh punishment, that keeping families together made people more productive because they were happier. That was not typical.

Teacher: Right.

Elizabeth V. Chew: Yeah. But I think that the slaves raising gardens and chickens, perfect, totally normal. Slaves owning goods across the South, completely typical.

Teacher: Wow.

Elizabeth V. Chew: It's probably the thing that most people don't know about slavery, that is most surprising to them. That is absolutely the case. In the very very deep South, like Louisiana, and maybe even Alabama, it's less so, but in the Mid-Atlantic, the Carolinas, it's completely the way it is.

Teacher: And these are very high-quality goods that they had, then, would that have been typical as well, that they had—

Elizabeth V. Chew: It's what was available. You know, they're on the spectrum of things you could have. They're not at the very top. Jefferson has some Sevres porcelain from Paris, but he has this stuff also.

Teacher: Wow.

Elizabeth V. Chew: So it's sort of like your everyday china, as opposed to your grandmother's fancy china, but it's absolutely the same thing that any of the other

Teacher: And where would that have come from, from Europe as well?

Elizabeth V. Chew: Stores in the area. These would have still been English by this time, but they would have been available, widely available in stores in every town in the U.S.

Teacher: So, typical. Like Pfaltzgraff kind of.

Elizabeth V. Chew: Yeah, he could have gone to Charlottesville on Sundays and bought them. Merchants stayed open on Sundays so the slaves could come, actually. And they bought things like tablewares and then clothing, things like buckles and buttons and hooks for clothing that they would make themselves and fabric. Jefferson gave slaves basic food, two sets of clothing a year, blankets, and then cook pots when they got married, but people had a lot more than that, that they acquired through their own incredible ingenuity and entrepreneurship basically.

Teacher: That's interesting.

Elizabeth V. Chew: It took a lot, it took so much effort and ability to survive laboring like that.

Teacher: Is there any evidence that slaves worked with Jefferson intensely on his inventions and machinery?

Elizabeth V. Chew: Oh, yeah. That's such a good question.

Jacqueline Langholtz: What was the question?

Elizabeth V. Chew: Whether slaves worked with him. Slaves definitely made the plow. I think, he lived in this cerebral region of his brain that he never, hardly ever went out of. I think he just saw—he drew all these geometric models of how he derived it. I think he kind of felt it in the abstract and then he had slaves—made it, build it, and then try to use it. But they probably were not involved in the design decisions.

Teacher: Right. Because that would have taken a lot of skill to craft.

Elizabeth V. Chew: No kidding.

Jacqueline Langholtz: Well, I get these same feelings about what you see in the house, or even the Campeachy chairs, even the friezes. So Jefferson is—he's the one traveling, he's the one reading, and then he's saying oh, I want this in my house. And then you have John Hemmings and James Dinsmore. But John Hemmings, who has not traveled, who hasn't read about these—

Elizabeth V. Chew: Who wasn't educated.

Jacqueline Langholtz: Right, who wasn't educated, making 3D versions, bringing Jefferson's physical ideas to life. It's just incredible to me.

Teacher: Wow.