Episode notes
Thomas Jefferson began designing Monticello, Italian for little mountain, at 14, after inheriting a 5,000 acre property with an 850 foot peak in the Virginia Piedmont. After serving as the U.S. minister in France, where he admired the Pantheon and the Hôtel de Salm, he tore off the second floor and spent decades remodeling, adding a mezzanine and an octagonal dome that was too hot in summer, too cold in winter, and reachable only by a steep, narrow stair. His alcove bed, cross breezes, and cupola show his obsession with efficiency, while debts from French wine, books, and renovations left visitors in 1824 describing the house as slovenly. Just 300 feet south lay Mulberry Row, where enslaved people lived in cabins that grew more crowded from the 1770s to the 1790s.
After Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, his daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph sold the house in 1831 for $7,500, and in 1834 it sold for $2,500 to Uriah P. Levy, the first Jewish commodore in the U.S. Navy, who admired Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. The Confederacy seized it during the Civil War, and in 1879 his nephew, Congressman Jefferson Monroe Levy, bought out the other heirs and restored it. In 1909 Maud Littleton launched a campaign calling Levy an alien and an outsider, and in 1923 he sold to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation for $500,000, which then left the Levys out of the story for 60 years.
- The east wall clock with only an hour hand, because Jefferson judged field workers did not need the minute
- The Farm Book system that sent enslaved boys to the nailery at 10 with extra rations for high output, and girls to spinning and weaving at 16
- James Hemings, trained as a chef in France and credited with popularizing macaroni and cheese in America
- The room next to Jefferson's suite identified as Sally Hemings' quarters, and the Getting Word oral history project
- Rachel Levy's neglected grave on the grounds, restored only after director Daniel Jordan took over in the 1980s