On a summer's day in 1796, Mulberry Row would have been humming with activity, with over thirty people at work in its shops and yards. While linens boiled in the wash house and milkpans clattered in the dairy, the hammers of fourteen nailmakers rang on anvils near the roaring forge of the blacksmith.

A view of the garden facing east from the end of Mulberry Row, roughly where the Carpenter's House used to be. The chimney still standing on the upper left corner of the photo was part of the Joinery (see below).

Wood chips and shavings were scattered by the axes and planes of the carpenters and joiners, and two sawyers worked a pit saw slowly through a cherry log. Mule-drawn carts rattled up and down this plantation "street" bringing barrels of water, firewood for the kitchen, and charcoal for the forges. As daylight faded, the shops grew silent and the dwellings on Mulberry Row were animated by the return of Monticello's workers, both black and white.

Named for the mulberry trees planted along it, this 1,000-foot-long road was the center of plantation activity at Monticello from the 1770s to Jefferson's death in 1826. Jefferson's original plan for the site was a 400-foot-long row of shops and yards joined structurally so as to look like a single building. There, iron and woodworking facilities and areas for raising poultry and slaughtering livestock would serve as a link between the plantation at large and the domestic operations, like kitchen, dairy, and smokehouse, that Jefferson planned for dependency wings attached to the main house.

Thirty years passed, however, before Jefferson was able to execute his wing plans, so that Mulberry Row became the site of an assortment of mainly temporary structures serving both the 5,000-acre plantation and the house. In 1796, when Jefferson had temporarily retired from public office, there were 17 structures along the Row. These included dwellings for black and white workers, wood and ironworking shops, a smokehouse and dairy, a wash house, storehouses, and a stable.

Over the nearly 60 years of Jefferson's residence, activity ebbed and flowed on Mulberry Row. Buildings were erected or dismantled, enlarged or adapted for new uses. When the domestic operations were transferred in 1808 to the south dependency wing of the house, Jefferson considered removing many of the buildings from Mulberry Row. Whether or not he carried out his plan, the log and wood-frame structures have long since vanished from the mountaintop. Only the three buildings constructed in stone have survived in part.

Joinery

The foundations and chimney are all that survive of the Monticello joinery. Here, some of the finest architectural woodwork in Virginia was shaped and joined, in the forty-year course of the construction and reconstruction of the Monticello house. Also made in the joinery were a number of pieces of furniture (some presently on display in the house) and the wooden parts of Jefferson's carriages. An 1809 inventory of this joinery reveals that it was one of the best equipped woodworking shops in Virginia.

Jefferson hired highly skilled white joiners to come to Monticello to make all the visible woodwork in the house - the decorative wall moldings, floors, and some window sash. Men like James Dinsmore and John Neilson, who later worked at James Madison's Montpelier and the University of Virginia, passed their skills on to Jefferson's slaves. After 1809, when the white workmen left, black artisans like John Herrings carried on the exceptional work of the Monticello joinery.

The African-American Community

"My opinion has ever been that until more can be done for them, we should endeavor, with those whom fortune has thrown on our hands, to feed and clothe them well, protect them from ill usage, require such reasonable labor only as is performed voluntarily by freemen, and be led by no repugnancies to abdicate them, and our duties to them." --Thomas Jefferson, 1814.

Jefferson, who called the institution of slavery an "abominable crime," was all his life a slaveholder. Successful in outlawing the international slave trade to Virginia, he was disappointed by the failure of his early efforts to end or restrict slavery, and came to believe that a practicable solution to the problem could not be found in his lifetime. He continued, however, to advocate privately his own emancipation plan, which included a provision for resettling freed slaves outside the United States.

When Jefferson inherited about 20 slaves from his father in 1764,Virginians had been working their plantations primarily with black slave labor since the beginning of the century. In 1774 Jefferson inherited 135 more slaves from his father-in-law, John Wayles, who had been directly involved in the importation of enslaved Africans into Virginia. This practice was not prohibited until 1778, by an act drafted by Jefferson himself.

By 1796, Jefferson owned about 170 slaves - 50 living on his land in Bedford County and 120 here in Albemarle County. The 70 adult slaves on the Monticello plantation were the foundation of Jefferson's labor system, performing the farming and household tasks, driving the wagons, constructing the buildings, and making items of wood and iron necessary for plantation and house.

Monticello's African-American laborers worked from dawn to dusk, six days a week. Only after their long work day, and on Sundays and holidays, could they follow their own pursuits. Music, dancing, and prayer meetings, as well as midnight excursions in search of wild honey, are mentioned in the records. It is also evident that they devoted much of their free time to supplementing their rations - by working in their vegetable gardens and poultry yards, by fishing and trapping, and by making furniture and clothing. Jefferson paid them for vegetables, chickens, and fish for the main house, as well as for extra tasks performed outside their normal working hours. He also encouraged some of his enslaved artisans by offering them a percentage of what they produced in their shops.

"Nothing would induce me to put my negroes out of my own protection," Jefferson wrote in 1820. Like many of his contemporaries in Virginia, he held paternalistic views of his human property, feeling responsible for their welfare while doubting their ability to succeed in a free white world. He even advanced the "suspicion," in his Notes on Virginia, that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites. Jefferson had strong scruples against selling slaves, while freeing "persons whose habits have been formed in slavery," he said, "is like abandoning children."Yet, economic difficulties forced him to sell almost 100 slaves during his lifetime, and his death left the remainder unprotected. He freed or bequeathed freedom to only seven slaves, all skilled artisans who could be expected to prosper as free men. Because Jefferson died deeply in debt, most of the other members of the Monticello African-American community were sold at auction and dispersed among different owners in Albemarle and surrounding counties.

The Hemings Sisters

Living in cabins on Mulberry Row in the 1790s were several of the daughters of Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings (c1735-1807), a slave who came to Monticello as part of the inheritance of Jefferson's wife, Martha, from her father, John Wayles. Betty and her twelve children and numerous grandchildren occupied most of the important household and artisan positions at Monticello.

Her daughter Nance (17611827+) was a Monticello weaver, who received her training under a white weaver during the Revolution. Nance's sister Bett (1759-1830+) was personal servant to Jefferson's wife, while Critta (1769-1850) served in a number of domestic capacities.

In 1793, Jefferson specified that she should live in the nearest of the new 12'x14' log cabins on Mulberry Row, "as oftenest wanted about the house." Critta was briefly nurse to Jefferson's grandson Francis Eppes, who later bought her freedom so that she could join her husband, a member of the local free black community.

The youngest Hemings sister, Sally (1773-1835), traveled from Virginia to France at the age of fourteen, accompanying Jefferson's young daughter Mary. In Paris Sally was taught the skills of a lady's maid, learning to dress hair, stitch decorative hems, and launder fine silks. Thereafter she was personal servant to Jefferson's daughters and granddaughters. She was given her "time" (informally emancipated) by Jefferson's daughter Martha after his death.

Sally Hemings' name became linked to Jefferson's in 1802, when a Richmond newspaper editor claimed that she was Jefferson's mistress and had borne him a number of children. This issue, on which Jefferson himself made no explicit public or private comment, has been the subject of debate for two centuries. Following genetic testing in 1998 and an ensuing review of the historical record, historians generally accept the probability of a relationship that produced at least one and perhaps all six of Sally Hemings' children listed in Jefferson's records. Jefferson provided for the freedom of all of Sally Hemings' children when they reached the age of twenty-one, the only Monticello slaves to live their entire adult lives in freedom.

John Hemings 1776-1833

John Hemings was the son of Betty Hemings and, it was said, Joseph Neilson, one of the white housejoiners hired by Jefferson in the 1770s. Hemings started his working life as an "outcarpenter,"felling trees and hewing logs, building fences and barns, and helping to construct the log dwellings on Mulberry Row.

John Hemings must have demonstrated his ability early, for at the age of seventeen he was put to work under a succession of skilled white woodworkers hired by Jefferson to enlarge the main house. Hemings learned to make wheels and fine mahogany furniture, and to use an elaborate set of planes to create decorative interior moldings. He was principal assistant to James Dinsmore, the Irish joiner responsible for most of the elegant woodwork in the Monticello house, and Hemings alone crafted much of the interior woodwork of Jefferson's house at Poplar Forest in Bedford County. He also made all the wooden parts of a large landau carriage Jefferson designed in 1814. He thus became far more than a carpenter - he was a highly skilled joiner and cabinetmaker.

John Hemings was a great favorite with Jefferson's grandchildren, who told of his making toys and furniture for them. His wife Priscilla was their "mammy." Jefferson freed John Hemings in his will, allowing him the tools from the joinery as well as the work of his two assistants. After 1826, he lived at Monticello for some years, working for Jefferson's daughter and son-in-law.

Isaac Jefferson 1775-c1850

Born at Monticello in 1775, Isaac Jefferson was the third son of two very important members of the Monticello labor force. Great George rose from foreman of labor to become, in 1797, overseer of Monticello -the only slave to reach that position. His wife Ursula was a particularly trusted household servant who had been purchased at the request ofJefferson's wife, Martha. Ursula was a pastrycook and laundress, and was responsible for the preservation of meat and bottling of cider.

Isaac Jefferson in 1847 (photo from pamphlet).

Great George and Ursula's son Isaac was trained as a blacksmith. In the early 1790s Jefferson took him to Philadelphia to learn the tinsmithing trade. Isaac's reminiscences reveal that he first learned to make pepper boxes and graters, and then advanced to the more difficult art of making tin cups. When he returned to Monticello he practiced three trades, for he also worked in the Mulberry Row nailery. According to Jefferson's records for 1796, Isaac was the most efficient nailer, wasting the least amount of nailrod in the process.

In 1847, Isaac Jefferson, then a free man working as a blacksmith in Petersburg, was interviewed. His vivid recollections of life at Monticello include descriptions of Jefferson and a reference to the metalworking skills they shared: "My Old Master was neat a hand as ever you see to make keys and locks and small chains, iron and brass."

More Monticello

Introduction
Little Mountain
The Vegetable Garden
Mulberry Row
Graveyard

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