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125-576: Monticello ( / ˌ m ɒ n t ɪ ˈ tʃ ɛ l oʊ / MON -tih- CHEL -oh ) was the primary plantation of Thomas Jefferson , a Founding Father , author of the Declaration of Independence , and the third president of the United States . Jefferson began designing Monticello after inheriting land from his father at the age of 14. Located just outside Charlottesville, Virginia , in the Piedmont region,

250-461: A UNESCO World Heritage Site . The United States nickel has featured a depiction of Monticello on its reverse since 1938 (except for 2004-05). Jefferson designed the main house using neoclassical design principles pioneered by Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio and reworking the design through much of his presidency to include design elements popular in late 18th-century Europe and integrating numerous ideas of his own. Situated on

375-416: A butter churn . Once firm enough to separate out, but soft enough to stick together, the butter was taken out of the churn, washed in very cold water, and salted. The churning process also produced buttermilk as a by-product. It was the remaining liquid after the butter was removed from the churn. All of the products of this process would have been stored in the spring house or ice house . The smokehouse

500-406: A courtyard to the rear of the main house known as the kitchen yard. They included a cookhouse (separate kitchen building), pantry , washhouse ( laundry ), smokehouse , chicken house , spring house or ice house , milkhouse ( dairy ), covered well , and cistern . The privies would have been located some distance away from the plantation house and kitchen yard. The cookhouse or kitchen

625-451: A house museum and educational institution. Visitors can wander the grounds, as well as tour rooms in the cellar and ground floor. More expensive tour pass options include sunset hours, as well as tours of the second floor and the third floor, including the iconic dome. Monticello is a National Historic Landmark . It is the only private home in the United States to be designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site . Included in that designation are

750-451: A primer , and a hornbook . As the children grew older their schooling began to prepare them for their adult roles on the plantation. Boys studied academic subjects, proper social etiquette , and plantation management, while girls learned art , music , French , and the domestic skills suited to the mistress of a plantation. Most plantation owners maintained an office for keeping records, transacting business, writing correspondence, and

875-547: A vacuum pan , where it was boiled until the sugar in the syrup was crystallized. The crystallized sugar was then cooled and separated from any remaining molasses in a process known as purging. The final step was packing the sugar into hogshead barrels for transport to market. Cotton plantations, the most common type of plantation in the South prior to the Civil War, were the last type of plantation to fully develop. Cotton production

1000-567: A building raised roughly a story off of the ground on posts, was used to separate the lighter chaff and dust from the rice. Sugar plantations were most commonly found in Louisiana. In fact, Louisiana produced almost all of the sugar grown in the United States during the prewar period. From one-quarter to one-half of all sugar consumed in the United States came from Louisiana sugar plantations. Plantations grew sugarcane from Louisiana's colonial era onward, but large scale production did not begin until

1125-413: A center hallway and a parallel set of rooms to the structure, more than doubling its area. He removed the second full-height story from the original house and replaced it with a mezzanine bedroom floor. The interior is centered on two large rooms, which served as an entrance-hall-museum, where Jefferson displayed his scientific interests, and a music-sitting room. The most dramatic element of the new design

1250-469: A collaboration between the National Museum of African American History and Culture and Monticello, it is the first exhibit on the national mall to address such issues. In February 2012, Monticello opened a new outdoor exhibit on its grounds: Landscape of Slavery: Mulberry Row at Monticello, to convey more about the lives of the hundreds of slaves who lived and worked at the plantation. The main house

1375-627: A cooling air-current to pass through the house, and the octagonal cupola draws hot air up and out. In the late twentieth century, moderate air conditioning, designed to avoid the harm to the house and its contents that would be caused by major modifications and large temperature differentials, was installed in the house, a tourist attraction. Before Jefferson's death, Monticello had begun to show signs of disrepair. The attention Jefferson's university project in Charlottesville demanded, and family problems, diverted his focus. The most important reason for

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1500-527: A corrugated wash board until clean. By the 1850s, they would have been passed through a mangle . Prior to that time, wringing out the items was done by hand. The items would then be ready to be hung out to dry or, in inclement weather, placed on a drying rack . Ironing would have been done with a metal flat iron , often heated in the fireplace, and various other devices. The milkhouse would have been used by enslaved people to make milk into cream , butter , and buttermilk . The process started with separating

1625-555: A dozen boys working at the nailery. While working at the nailery, boys received more food and may have received new clothes if they did a good job. After the nailery, boys became blacksmiths, coopers, carpenters, or house servants. Six families and their descendants were featured in the exhibit, Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello: Paradox of Liberty (January to October 2012) at the Smithsonian 's National Museum of American History , which also examined Jefferson as an enslaver. Developed as

1750-476: A fall protection system. Removable sections of railing or gates that swing or slide open would be used to open up the area and allow the transfer of material, and then close once the material is removed. However, current ANSI standards require dual-gate safety systems for fall protection. Dual-gate safety systems were created to secure these areas, allowing a barrier to be in place at all times, even while pallets are being loaded or removed. Dual-gate systems create

1875-452: A flat surface of still lower land, with a silver thread of water curling through it, extended, Holland-like, to the horizon. Usually at as great a distance as a quarter of a mile from the road, and from a half mile to a mile apart, were the residences of the planters – large white houses, with groves of evergreen trees about them; and between these and the road were little villages of slave-cabins ... The cottages were framed buildings, boarded on

2000-557: A house museum and educational institution. Jefferson's home was built to serve as a plantation house , which ultimately took on the architectural form of a villa . Work began on what historians would subsequently refer to as "the first Monticello" in 1768, on a plantation of 5,000 acres (2,000 ha). Jefferson moved into the South Pavilion (an outbuilding) in 1770, where his new wife Martha Wayles Skelton joined him in 1772. Jefferson continued work on his original design, but how much

2125-430: A largely agrarian to an industrial society , plantations and their building complexes became obsolete. Although the majority have been destroyed, the most common structures to have survived are the plantation houses . As is true of buildings in general, the more substantially built and architecturally interesting buildings have tended to be the ones that survived into the modern age and are better documented than many of

2250-410: A main house on site. Just as vital and arguably more important to the complex were the many structures built for the processing and storage of crops, food preparation and storage, sheltering equipment and animals, and various other domestic and agricultural purposes. The value of the plantation came from its land and the enslaved people who toiled on it to produce crops for sale. These same people produced

2375-771: A mezzanine (and how heavy the mezzanine may be), and to design the appropriate mezzanine. Custom Mezzanines are steel, raised industrial platform structures that are designed specifically to match the space and capacity needs of a given facility. It will, at a minimum, include a stairway for accessing the mezzanine. These structures typically are the strongest in terms of support capacity. Standard Mezzanines are steel, raised industrial platform structures that are completely self-supporting and are sold in predetermined sizes and shapes. These off-the-shelf structures are usually strong (in terms of support capacity) and less expensive than custom mezzanines. Employees in material handling and manufacturing are often at risk of falls when they are on

2500-612: A mezzanine to have as much as one-third of the floor space of the floor below. Local building codes may vary somewhat from this standard. A space may have more than one mezzanine, as long as the sum total of floor space of all the mezzanines is not greater than one-third the floor space of the complete floor below. Mezzanines help to make a high-ceilinged space feel more personal and less vast, and can create additional floor space. Mezzanines, however, may have lower-than-normal ceilings due to their location. The term "mezzanine" does not imply any particular function; mezzanines can be used for

2625-539: A more accurate image of what life was like for slaves and slave owners", The Washington Post wrote in 2019. Hannah Knowles in The Washington Post wrote, "The changes have begun to draw people long alienated by the sites' whitewashing of the past and to satisfy what staff call a hunger for real history, as plantations add slavery-focused tours, rebuild cabins and reconstruct the lives of the enslaved with help from their descendants." However, some white visitors to

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2750-527: A one-thousand ft (300 m) road of slave, service, and industrial structures. Mulberry Row was situated three hundred ft (100 m) south of Monticello, with the quarters facing the Jefferson mansion. These cabins were occupied by the African slaves who worked in the mansion or in Jefferson's manufacturing ventures, and not by those who labored in the fields. At one point, "Jefferson sketched out plans for

2875-448: A painted green and black checkered floor. Summertime temperatures are high in the region, with indoor temperatures of around 100 °F (38 °C). Jefferson himself is known to have been interested in Roman and Renaissance texts about ancient temperature-control techniques such as ground-cooled air and heated floors. Monticello's large central hall and aligned windows were designed to allow

3000-474: A pivoting serving door with shelves. Monticello is known as the birthplace of macaroni and cheese in the United States. While it is a myth that Monticello is its American birthplace, it is true that it was made popular there. Jefferson's slave and cook James Hemings , brother of Sally Hemings , Jefferson's slave mistress, perfected the dish and made it similar to the way it is prepared today. Jefferson located one set of his quarters for slaves on Mulberry Row,

3125-456: A place for the hired tutor or governess to educate the planter's children, and sometimes even those of other planters in the area. On most plantations, however, a room in the main house was sufficient for schooling, rather than a separate dedicated building. Paper was precious, so the children often recited their lessons until they memorized them. The usual texts in the beginning were the Bible ,

3250-422: A plantation is that it typically had 500 to 1,000 acres (2.0 to 4.0 km ) or more of land and produced one or two cash crops for sale. Other scholars have attempted to define it by the number of enslaved persons. The vast majority of plantations did not have grand mansions centered on a huge acreage. These large estates did exist, but represented only a small percentage of the plantations that once existed in

3375-462: A room in the "south dependency" below the main house. On the slope below Mulberry Row, African slaves maintained an extensive vegetable garden for the main house. In addition to growing flowers for display and producing crops for eating, Jefferson used the gardens of Monticello for experimenting with different species. The house was the center of a plantation of 5,000 acres (2,000 ha) tended by some 150 slaves. There are also two houses included in

3500-404: A row of substantial, dignified neoclassical houses" for Mulberry Row, for enslaved blacks and white workers, "having in mind an integrated row of residences." Archaeology of the site shows that the rooms of the cabins were much larger in the 1770s than in the 1790s. Researchers disagree as to whether this indicates that more slaves were crowded into a smaller spaces, or that fewer people lived in

3625-408: A strainer to be collected into a tank. From there the juice went through a process that removed impurities from the liquid and thickened it through evaporation. It was steam-heated in vats where additional impurities were removed by adding lime to the syrup and then the mixture was strained. At this point the liquid had been transformed into molasses . It was then placed into a closed vessel known as

3750-473: A surname, but many had their own surnames as early as the 18th century.) Some of Mulberry Row has been designated as archeological sites, where excavations and analysis are revealing much about the life of slaves at the plantation. In the winter of 2000–2001, the African slave burial ground at Monticello was discovered. In the fall of 2001, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation held a commemoration of

3875-526: A village-like grouping along an avenue away from the main house, but sometimes were scattered around the plantation on the edges of the fields where the enslaved people toiled, like most of the sharecropper cabins that were to come later. Houses for enslaved people were often of the most basic construction. Meant for little more than sleeping, they were usually rough log or frame one-room cabins; early examples often had chimneys made of clay and sticks. Hall and parlor houses (two rooms) were also represented on

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4000-539: A visit to plantations along the Georgia coast in 1855: In the afternoon, I left the main road, and, towards night, reached a much more cultivated district. The forest of pines extended uninterruptedly on one side of the way, but on the other was a continued succession of very large fields, or rich dark soil – evidently reclaimed swamp-land – which had been cultivated the previous year, in Sea Island cotton, or maize. Beyond them,

4125-426: A white elite . Today, as was also true in the past, there is a wide range of opinion as to what differentiated a plantation from a farm . Typically, the focus of a farm was subsistence agriculture . In contrast, the primary focus of a plantation was the production of cash crops , with enough staple food crops produced to feed the population of the estate and the livestock. A common definition of what constituted

4250-527: A wide array of purposes. Mezzanines are commonly used in modern architecture , which places a heavy emphasis on light and space. In industrial settings, mezzanines may be installed (rather than built as part of the structure) in high-ceilinged spaces such as warehouses. These semi-permanent structures are usually free-standing, can be dismantled and relocated, and are sold commercially. Industrial mezzanine structures can be supported by structural steel columns and elements, or by racks or shelves. Depending on

4375-569: Is located in the TPC Southwind development in Memphis, Tennessee and was inspired by the architecture of Monticello. Perrot Library (1931), Old Greenwich, Connecticut, was inspired by Jeffersonian architecture and Monticello. The exterior of University of the Cumberlands ' Ward and Regina Correll Science Complex is also a replica of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello mansion. The $ 1 million expansion of

4500-516: Is part of the Mountaintop Project, which includes restorations in order to give a fuller account of the lives of both enslaved and free families at Monticello. The west front gives the impression of a villa of modest proportions, with a lower floor disguised in the hillside. The north wing includes two guest bedrooms and the dining room. It has a dumbwaiter incorporated into the fireplace, as well as dumbwaiters (shelved tables on casters) and

4625-621: Is the home of the Gary Cook School of Leadership, as well as the University Chancellor's offices. Saint Paul's Baptist Church located at the corner of East Belt Boulevard and Hull Street Road in Richmond is modeled after Monticello. Originally built by Weatherford Memorial Baptist Church, the building was donated to St Paul's when Weatherford Memorial disbanded in the early 2000s. Pi Kappa Alpha 's Memorial Headquarters, opened in 1988,

4750-545: The Episcopal denomination. Early records indicate that at Faunsdale Plantation the mistress of the estate, Louisa Harrison, gave regular instruction to her slaves by reading the services of the church and teaching the Episcopal catechism to their children. Following the death of her first husband, she had a large Carpenter Gothic church built, St. Michael's Church. She latter remarried to Rev. William A. Stickney, who served as

4875-723: The Naval Academy Jewish Chapel at Annapolis is modeled on Monticello. Chamberlin Hall at Wilbraham & Monson Academy in Wilbraham, Massachusetts , built in 1962 and modeled on Monticello, serves as the location of the Academy's Middle School. Completed in August 2015, Dallas Baptist University built one of the largest replicas of Monticello, including its entry halls and a dome room. Approximately 23,000 sq ft (2,100 m), it

5000-655: The Pantheon , even though he was never able to make the trip to Rome to see it in person. Not only did the temple's facade influence Monticello, but also the Rotunda, which is a library found at the University of Virginia . Both buildings have a temple like front replicating the Pantheon facade with large structural columns. This building front is also similar to the Palladian. The back side of

5125-547: The South Carolina Lowcountry . Until the 19th century, rice was threshed from the stalks and the husk was pounded from the grain by hand, a very labor-intensive endeavor. Steam-powered rice pounding mills had become common by the 1830s. They were used to thresh the grain from the inedible chaff . A separate chimney, required for the fires powering the steam engine, was adjacent to the pounding mill and often connected by an underground system. The winnowing barn ,

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5250-558: The United States Congress to replace the books lost in the 1814 burning of Washington during the War of 1812 . This second library formed the nucleus of the Library of Congress . As "larger than life" as Monticello seems, the house has approximately 11,000 sq ft (1,000 m) of living space. Jefferson considered much furniture to be a waste of space, so the dining room table

5375-621: The forced labor of enslaved people. Plantations are an important aspect of the history of the Southern United States , particularly before the American Civil War . The mild temperate climate , plentiful rainfall, and fertile soils of the Southeastern United States allowed the flourishing of large plantations, where large numbers of enslaved Africans were held captive and forced to produce crops to create wealth for

5500-413: The span and the run of the mezzanine, different materials may be used for the mezzanine's deck like fibre cement boards. Some industrial mezzanines may also include enclosed, paneled office space on their upper levels. There are three basic types of industrial mezzanines: custom, standard or modular. A structural engineer is sometimes hired to help determine whether the floor of the building can support

5625-580: The "academic village" of the University of Virginia, and the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond. Much of Monticello's interior decoration reflects the personal ideas and ideals of Jefferson. The original main entrance is through the portico on the east front. The ceiling of this portico incorporates a wind plate connected to a weather vane , showing the direction of the wind. A large clock face on

5750-533: The "great house" and extended family. Novels, often adapted into films , presented a romantic , sanitized view of plantation life and ignored or glorified white supremacy . The most popular of these were The Birth of a Nation (1916), based on Thomas Dixon Jr. ,'s best-selling novel The Clansman (1905), and Gone with the Wind (1939), based on the best-selling novel of the same name (1936) by Margaret Mitchell . On larger plantations an overseer represented

5875-644: The "modern" trends in French architecture that were then fashionable in Paris. His decision to remodel his own home may date from this period. In 1794, following his tenure as the first U.S. Secretary of State (1790–1793), Jefferson began rebuilding his house based on the ideas he had acquired in Europe. The remodeling continued throughout most of his presidency (1801–1809). Although generally completed by 1809, Jefferson continued work on Monticello until his death in 1826. Jefferson added

6000-401: The 1810s and 1820s. A successful sugar plantation required a skilled retinue of hired labor and enslaved people. The most specialized structure on a sugar plantation was the sugar mill (sugar house), where, by the 1830s, the steam-powered mill crushed the sugarcane stalks between rollers. This squeezed the juice from the stalks and the cane juice would run out the bottom of the mill through

6125-671: The Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom , suggests that the minimum requirement for planter status was twenty people enslaved, especially since a Southern planter could exempt Confederate duty for one white male per twenty people owned. In his study of Black Belt counties in Alabama, Jonathan Weiner defines planters by ownership of real property, rather than of slaves. A planter, for Weiner, owned at least $ 10,000 worth of real estate in 1850 and $ 32,000 worth in 1860, equivalent to about

6250-615: The Episcopal minister of St. Michael's and was later appointed by Bishop Richard Wilmer as a "Missionary to the Negroes," after which Louisa joined him as an unofficial fellow minister among the African Americans of the Black Belt . Most plantation churches were of wood-frame construction, although some were built in brick, often stuccoed . Early examples tended towards the vernacular or neoclassicism, but later examples were almost always in

6375-955: The Gothic Revival style. A few rivaled those built by southern town congregations. Two of the most elaborate extant examples in the Deep South are the Chapel of the Cross at Annandale Plantation and St. Mary's Chapel at Laurel Hill Plantation , both Episcopalian structures in Mississippi. In both cases the original plantation houses have been destroyed, but the quality and design of the churches can give some insight into how elaborate some plantation complexes and their buildings could be. St. Mary Chapel, in Natchez, dates to 1839, built in stuccoed brick with large Gothic and Tudor arch windows, hood mouldings over

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6500-621: The Science Complex was started in May 2007 and classes began in January 2009. Monticello's image has appeared on U.S. currency and postage stamps. An image of the west front of Monticello by Felix Schlag has been featured on the reverse of the nickel minted since 1938 (with a brief interruption in 2004 and 2005, when designs of the Westward Journey series appeared instead). It was also used as

6625-444: The South. Although many Southern farmers did enslave people before emancipation in 1862, few enslaved more than five. These farmers tended to work the fields alongside the people they enslaved. Of the estimated 46,200 plantations existing in 1860, 20,700 had 20 to 30 enslaved people and 2,300 had a workforce of a hundred or more, with the rest somewhere in between. Many plantations were operated by absentee-landowners and never had

6750-454: The age of 10, children served as nurses. When the plantation grew tobacco, children were at a good height to remove and kill tobacco worms from the crops. Once he began growing wheat, fewer people were needed to maintain the crops, so Jefferson established manual trades. He stated that children "go into the ground or learn trades". When girls were 16, they began spinning and weaving textiles. Boys made nails from age 10 to 16. In 1794, Jefferson had

6875-618: The bale was secured with twine. An individual who owned a plantation was known as a planter . Historians of the prewar South have generally defined "planter" most precisely as a person owning property (real estate) and keeping 20 or more people enslaved . In the " Black Belt " counties of Alabama and Mississippi , the terms "planter" and "farmer" were often synonymous. The historians Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman define large planters as those who enslaved over 50 people, and medium planters as those who enslaved between 16 and 50 people. Historian David Williams, in A People's History of

7000-548: The buildings also pays tribute to the Roman temple. Jefferson did this by including a dome shape behind the temple front. After Jefferson resigned from Washington's cabinet, he chose to remodel portions of Monticello. This time he was greatly influenced by the Hôtel de Salm in Paris. The house is similar in appearance to Chiswick House , a Neoclassical house inspired by the architect Andrea Palladio built in 1726–1729 in London . Monticello

7125-426: The built environment: the main house for the plantation owner, the slave cabins , barns, and other structures of the complex. The materials for a plantation's buildings, for the most part, came from the lands of the estate. Lumber was obtained from the forested areas of the property. Depending on its intended use, it was either split, hewn , or sawn. Bricks were most often produced onsite from sand and clay that

7250-584: The burial ground, in which the names of known slaves of Monticello were read aloud. Additional archeological work is providing information about African American burial practices. In 2003, Monticello welcomed a reunion of descendants of Jefferson from both the Wayles's and Hemings's sides of the family. It was organized by the descendants, who have created a new group called the Monticello Community. Additional and larger reunions have since been held. In 2004,

7375-417: The cookhouse or a storehouse and would have secured items such as barrels of salt , sugar , flour , cornmeal and the like. The washhouse is where clothes, tablecloths, and bed-covers were cleaned and ironed. It also sometimes had living quarters for the laundrywoman . Cleaning laundry in this period was labor-intensive for the domestic slaves that performed it. It required various gadgets to accomplish

7500-458: The crop. Tobacco plantations were most common in certain parts of Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Virginia. The first agricultural plantations in Virginia were founded on the growing of tobacco. Tobacco production on plantations was very labor-intensive. It required the entire year to gather seeds, start them growing in cold frames , and then transplant

7625-565: The doors and windows, buttresses , a crenelated roof-line, and a small Gothic spire crowning the whole. Although construction records are very sketchy, the Chapel of the Cross, built from 1850 to 1852 near Madison, may be attributable to Frank Wills or Richard Upjohn , both of whom designed almost identical churches in the North during the same time period that the Chapel of the Cross was built. Another secondary structure on many plantations during

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7750-471: The external east-facing wall has only an hour hand since Jefferson thought this was accurate enough for those he enslaved. The clock reflects the time shown on the "Great Clock", designed by Jefferson, in the entrance hall. The entrance hall contains recreations of items collected by Lewis and Clark on the cross-country expedition commissioned by Jefferson to explore the Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson had

7875-552: The fields were farther from the mansion. At Jefferson's direction, he was buried on the grounds, in an area now designated as the Monticello Cemetery. The cemetery is owned by the Monticello Association , a society of his descendants through Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson . After Jefferson's death, his daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph , apart from the small family graveyard, sold Monticello for $ 7,500. In 1834, it

8000-428: The fields. A few enslavers went further in providing housing for the household servants. When Waldwic in Alabama was remodeled in the Gothic Revival style in the 1852, the enslaved people serving the household were provided with larger accommodations that matched the architecture of the main house. This model, however, was exceedingly rare. Famous landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted had this recollection of

8125-403: The financial panics of 1819 and 1837, when demand by British mills for cotton dropped, many small planters went bankrupt and their land and slaves were bought by larger plantations. As cotton-producing estates grew in size, so did the number of slaveholders and the average number of enslaved people held. A cotton plantation normally had a cotton gin house, where the cotton gin was used to remove

8250-634: The first Jewish commodore (equivalent to today's rear admiral) in the United States Navy. A fifth-generation American whose family first settled in Savannah, Georgia , Levy greatly admired Jefferson and used private funds to repair, restore and preserve the house. The Confederate government seized the house as enemy property at the outset of the American Civil War and sold it to Confederate officer Benjamin Franklin Ficklin . Levy's estate recovered

8375-441: The floorcloth painted a "true grass green" upon the recommendation of artist Gilbert Stuart , so that Jefferson's "essay in architecture" could invite the spirit of the outdoors into the house. The south wing includes Jefferson's private suite of rooms. The library holds many books from his third library collection. His first library was burned in an accidental plantation fire, and he 'ceded' (or sold) his second library in 1815 to

8500-719: The food staples and equipment that they relied on for their existence. This type of debt bondage , for blacks and poor whites, led to a populist movement in the late 19th century that began to bring blacks and whites together for a common cause. This early populist movement is largely credited with helping to cause state governments in the South, mostly controlled by the planter elite, to enact various laws that disenfranchised poor whites and blacks, through grandfather clauses , literacy tests , poll taxes , and various other laws. The agricultural structures on plantations had some basic structures in common and others that varied widely. They depended on what crops and animals were raised on

8625-427: The form of monumental towers set near the main house. The pigeons were raised to be eaten as a delicacy and their droppings were used as fertilizer. Few functions could take place on a plantation without a reliable water supply. Every plantation had at least one, and sometimes several, wells . These were usually roofed and often partially enclosed by latticework to exclude animals. Since the well water in many areas

8750-496: The former Hermitage Plantation in Georgia and Boone Hall in South Carolina, even those who worked in the fields were provided with brick cabins. More fortunate in their accommodations were those who served in the enslavers' houses or were skilled laborers. They usually resided either in a part of the main house or in their own houses, which were normally more comfortable dwellings than those of their counterparts who worked in

8875-826: The grounds and house, which had been deteriorating seriously while the lawsuits wound their way through the courts in New York and Virginia. Together, the Levys preserved Monticello for nearly 100 years. In 1923, a private non-profit organization, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation , purchased the house from Jefferson Levy for $ 500,000 (~$ 6.96 million in 2023) with funds raised by Theodore Fred Kuper and others. They managed additional restoration under architects including Fiske Kimball and Milton L. Grigg . Since that time, other restoration has been performed at Monticello. The Jefferson Foundation operates Monticello and its grounds as

9000-455: The height of the sharecropping -era was the plantation store or commissary. Although some prewar plantations had a commissary that distributed food and supplies to enslaved people, the plantation store was essentially a postwar addition to the plantation complex. In addition to the share of their crop already owed to the plantation owner for the use of his or her land, tenants and sharecroppers purchased, usually on credit against their next crop,

9125-437: The home of Sally Hemings , Jefferson's sister-in-law and a slave woman who worked in the household. Hemings is widely believed to have had a 38-year relationship with the widower Jefferson and to have borne six children by him, four of whom survived to adulthood. The genealogist Helen F.M. Leary concluded that "the chain of evidence securely fastens Sally Hemings's children to their father, Thomas Jefferson." Later Hemings lived in

9250-884: The job. Recent figures show approximately 20,000 serious injuries and nearly 100 fatalities a year in industrial facilities. Falls of people and objects from mezzanines are of particular concern. In many industrial operations, openings are cut into the guardrail on mezzanines and elevated work platforms to allow picking of palletized material to be loaded and unloaded, often with a fork truck, to upper levels. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and International Building Council (IBC) have published regulations for fall protection and The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has published standards for securing pallet drop areas to protect workers that work on elevated platforms and are exposed to openings. In most cases, safety gates are used to secure these openings. OSHA requires openings 48 inches or taller to be secured with

9375-493: The like. Although it, like the schoolroom, was most often within the main house or another structure, it was not at all rare for a complex to have a separate plantation office. John C. Calhoun used his plantation office at his Fort Hill plantation in Clemson, South Carolina as a private sanctuary of sorts, with it utilized as both study and library during his twenty-five year residency. Another structure found on some estates

9500-399: The main house, at least partially due to his social position. It was also part of an effort to keep the enslaved people compliant and prevent the beginnings of a slave rebellion, a very real fear in the minds of most plantation owners. Economic studies indicate that fewer than 30 percent of planters employed white supervisors for their slave labor. Some planters appointed a trusted slave as

9625-481: The mansion's deterioration was his accumulating debts. In the last few years of Jefferson's life, much went without repair in Monticello. A witness, Samuel Whitcomb Jr. , who visited Jefferson in 1824, thought it run down. He said, "His house is rather old and going to decay; appearances about his yard and hill are rather slovenly. It commands an extensive prospect but it being a misty cloudy day, I could see but little of

9750-442: The meat could also be stored there until it was consumed. The chicken house was a building where chickens were kept. Its design could vary, depending on whether the chickens were kept for egg production, meat, or both. If for eggs, there were often nest boxes for egg laying and perches on which the birds to sleep. Eggs were collected daily. Some plantations also had pigeonniers ( dovecotes ) that, in Louisiana, sometimes took

9875-417: The milk into skim milk and cream. It was done by pouring the whole milk into a container and allowing the cream to naturally rise to the top. This was collected into another container daily until several gallons had accumulated. During this time the cream would sour slightly through naturally occurring bacteria. This increased the efficiency of the churning to come. Churning was an arduous task performed with

10000-424: The most common and distinctive features of the plantation landscape, has largely disappeared in much of the South. Many of the structures were insubstantial to begin with. Only the better-built examples tended to survive, and then usually only if they were put to other uses after emancipation. The quarters could be next to the main house, well away from it, or both. On large plantations they were often arranged in

10125-728: The museum houses presented an idyllic, dignified " lost cause " vision of the antebellum South . Recently, and to different degrees, some have begun to acknowledge the "horrors of slavery" which made that life possible. In late 2019, after contact initiated by Color of Change , "five major websites often used for wedding planning have pledged to cut back on promoting and romanticizing weddings at former slave plantations". The New York Times , earlier in 2019, "decided...to exclude couples who were being married on plantations from wedding announcements and other wedding coverage". "Many plantations, including George Washington 's Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson 's Monticello , are working to present

10250-511: The original grounds and buildings of Jefferson's University of Virginia . From 1989 to 1992, a team of architects from the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) created a collection of measured drawings of Monticello. These drawings are held by the Library of Congress . Among Jefferson's other designs are Poplar Forest , his private retreat near Lynchburg (which he intended for his daughter Maria, who died at age 25),

10375-405: The outside, with shingle roofs and brick chimneys; they stood fifty feet apart, with gardens and pig-yards ... At the head of the settlement, in a garden looking down the street, was an overseer's house, and here the road divided, running each way at right angles; on one side to barns and a landing on the river, on the other toward the mansion ... A crucial residential structure on larger plantations

10500-498: The overseer, and in Louisiana free black overseers were also used. Another residential structure largely unique to plantation complexes was the garconnière or bachelors' quarters. Mostly built by Louisiana Creole people , but occasionally found in other parts of the Deep South formerly under the dominion of New France , they were structures that housed the adolescent or unmarried sons of plantation owners. At some plantations it

10625-585: The palaces for the nobility at the Quirinal Palace . A mezzanine is an intermediate floor (or floors) in a building which is open to the floor below. It is placed halfway ( mezzo means 'half' in Italian) up the wall on a floor which has a ceiling at least twice as high as a floor with minimum height. A mezzanine does not count as one of the floors in a building, and generally does not count in determining maximum floorspace. The International Building Code permits

10750-406: The plantation landscape, offering a separate room for eating and sleeping. Sometimes dormitories and two-story dwellings were also used to house enslaved people. Earlier examples rested on the ground with a dirt floor, but later examples were usually raised on piers for ventilation. Most of these represent the dwellings constructed for enslaved people who worked in the fields. Rarely though, such as at

10875-482: The plantation was originally 5,000 acres (20 km), with Jefferson using the forced labor of black slaves for extensive cultivation of tobacco and mixed crops, later shifting from tobacco cultivation to wheat in response to changing markets. Due to its architectural and historic significance, the property has been designated a National Historic Landmark . In 1987, Monticello and the nearby University of Virginia , also designed by Jefferson, were together designated

11000-732: The plantation, used to house both horses and mules . These were usually separate, one for each type of animal. The mule stable was the most important on the vast majority of estates, since the mules did most of the work, pulling the plows and carts . Barns not involved in animal husbandry were most commonly the crib barn ( corn cribs or other types of granaries ), storage barns, or processing barns. Crib barns were typically built of unchinked logs , although they were sometimes covered with vertical wood siding. Storage barns often housed unprocessed crops or those awaiting consumption or transport to market. Processing barns were specialized structures that were necessary for helping to actually process

11125-599: The plantation. Common crops included corn , upland cotton , sea island cotton , rice , sugarcane , and tobacco . Besides those mentioned earlier, cattle , ducks , goats , hogs , and sheep were raised for their derived products and/or meat. All estates would have possessed various types of animal pens, stables , and a variety of barns . Many plantations utilized a number of specialized structures that were crop-specific and only found on that type of plantation. Plantation barns can be classified by function , depending on what type of crop and livestock were raised. In

11250-526: The plantations have pushed back against hearing about slavery. Mezzanine (architecture) Mezzanines may serve a wide variety of functions. Industrial mezzanines, such as those used in warehouses, may be temporary or semi-permanent structures. In Royal Italian architecture , mezzanino also means a chamber created by partitioning that does not go up all the way to the arch vaulting or ceiling; these were historically common in Italy and France, for example in

11375-594: The planter in matters of daily management. Usually perceived as uncouth, ill-educated, and low-class, he had the often despised task of meting out punishments in order to keep up discipline and secure the profit of his employer. Southern plantations depended upon slaves to do the agricultural work. "Honestly, 'plantation' and 'slavery' is one and the same," said an employee of the Whitney Plantation in 2019. Many manor houses survive, and in some cases former slave dwellings have been rebuilt or renovated. To pay for

11500-427: The plants to the fields once the soil had warmed. Then the enslaved people had to weed the fields all summer and remove the flowers from the tobacco plants in order to force more energy into the leaves. Harvesting was done by plucking individual leaves over several weeks as they ripened, or cutting entire tobacco plants and hanging them in vented tobacco barns to dry, called curing . Rice plantations were common in

11625-700: The postwar South. For example, James Battle Avirett , who grew up on the Avirett-Stephens Plantation in Onslow County, North Carolina , and served as an Episcopal chaplain in the Confederate States Army , published The Old Plantation: How We Lived in Great House and Cabin before the War in 1901. Such memoirs often included descriptions of Christmas as the epitome of anti-modern order exemplified by

11750-443: The property after the war. Levy's heirs argued over his estate, but their lawsuits were settled in 1879, when Uriah Levy's nephew, Jefferson Monroe Levy , a prominent New York lawyer, real estate speculator , and stock speculator (and later member of Congress), bought out the other heirs for $ 10,050, (~$ 278,643 in 2023) and took control of Monticello. Like his uncle, Jefferson Levy commissioned repairs, restoration and preservation of

11875-412: The property an eyesore, and planned to acquire it when it became available. In 1784, Thomas Jefferson left America to travel and explore the streets of France, which influenced his taste in architecture. He was mainly influenced by the neoclassical style commonly seen in French architecture, which is the reason Monticello is designed in a classical revival style. Jefferson had also been interested in

12000-548: The reverse. Plantation complexes in the Southern United States Plantation complexes were common on agricultural plantations in the Southern United States from the 17th into the 20th century. The complex included everything from the main residence down to the pens for livestock . Until the abolition of slavery , such plantations were generally self-sufficient settlements that relied on

12125-444: The seeds from raw cotton. After ginning, the cotton had to be baled before it could be warehoused and transported to market. This was accomplished with a cotton press, an early type of baler that was usually powered by two mules walking in a circle with each attached to an overhead arm that turned a huge wooden screw. The downward action of this screw compressed the processed cotton into a uniform bale-shaped wooden enclosure, where

12250-413: The separation was to prevent the noise and smells of cooking activities from reaching the main house. Sometimes the cookhouse contained two rooms, one for the actual kitchen and the other to serve as the residence for the cook. Still other arrangements had the kitchen in one room, a laundry in the other, and a second story for servant quarters. The pantry could be in its own structure or in a cool part of

12375-401: The smaller and simpler ones. Several plantation homes of important persons, including Mount Vernon , Monticello , and The Hermitage have also been preserved. Less common are intact examples of slave housing. The rarest survivors of all are the agricultural and lesser domestic structures, especially those dating from the pre-Civil War era. Housing for enslaved people, although once one of

12500-459: The smaller spaces. Earlier houses for slaves had a two-room plan, one family per room, with a single, shared doorway to the outside. But from the 1790s on, all rooms/families had independent doorways. Most of the cabins are free-standing, single-room structures. By the time of Jefferson's death, some enslaved families had labored and lived for four generations at Monticello. Thomas Jefferson recorded his strategy for child labor in his Farm Book. Until

12625-641: The summit of an 850 ft-high (260 m) peak in the Southwest Mountains south of the Rivanna Gap, the name Monticello derives from Italian meaning "little mountain". Along a prominent lane adjacent to the house, Mulberry Row, the plantation came to include numerous outbuildings for specialized functions, e.g., a nailery; quarters for slaves who worked in the home; gardens for flowers, produce, and Jefferson's experiments in plant breeding—along with tobacco fields and mixed crops. Cabins for slaves who worked in

12750-478: The surrounding scenery." After Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, his only official surviving daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph , inherited Monticello. The estate was encumbered with debt and Martha Randolph had financial problems in her own family because of her husband's mental illness . In 1831, she sold Monticello to James Turner Barclay , a local apothecary , for $ 7,500 (~$ 252,624 in 2023). Barclay sold it in 1834 to Uriah P. Levy for $ 2,500, (~$ 76,300 in 2023)

12875-417: The task. The wash boiler was a cast iron or copper cauldron in which clothes or other fabrics and soapy water were heated over an open fire. The wash-stick was a wooden stick with a handle at its uppermost part and four to five prongs at its base. It was simultaneously pounded up and down and rotated in the washing tub to aerate the wash solution and loosen any dirt. The items would then be vigorously rubbed on

13000-483: The term dependency can be applied to these buildings. A few were common, such as the carriage house and blacksmith shop; but most varied widely among plantations and were largely a function of what the planter wanted, needed, or could afford to add to the complex. These buildings might include schoolhouses , offices , churches , commissary stores , gristmills , and sawmills . Found on some plantations in every Southern state, plantation schoolhouses served as

13125-611: The title for the 2015 play Jefferson's Garden , which centered on his life. Monticello also appeared on the reverse of the two-dollar bill from 1928 to 1966, when the bill was discontinued. The bill was reintroduced in 1976 and retains Jefferson's portrait on the obverse but replaced Monticello on the reverse with an engraved modified reproduction of John Trumbull 's 1818 painting Declaration of Independence . The gift shop tour ticket booths at Monticello hands out two-dollar bills as change. The 1994 commemorative Thomas Jefferson 250th Anniversary silver dollar features Monticello on

13250-754: The top eight percent of landowners. In his study of southwest Georgia, Lee Formwalt defines planters in terms of size of land holdings rather than in terms of numbers of people enslaved. Formwalt's planters are in the top 4.5% of landowners, translating into real estate worth $ 6,000 or more in 1850, $ 24,000 or more in 1860, and $ 11,000 or more in 1870. In his study of Harrison County, Texas , Randolph B. Campbell classifies large planters as owners of 20 people, and small planters as owners of between 10 and 19 people. In Chicot and Phillips Counties, Arkansas, Carl H. Moneyhon defines large planters as owners of 20 or more people, and of 600 acres (240 ha) or more. Many nostalgic memoirs about plantation life were published in

13375-585: The trustees of TJF acquired Mountaintop Farm (also known locally as Patterson's or Brown's Mountain), the only property that overlooks Monticello. Jefferson had called the taller mountain Montalto. To prevent development of new homes on the site, the trustees spent $ 15 million to purchase the property. Jefferson had owned it as part of his plantation, but it was sold off after his death. In the 20th century, its farmhouses were divided into apartments for many University of Virginia students. TJF officials had long considered

13500-644: The upkeep, some, like the Monmouth Plantation in Natchez, Mississippi and the Lipscomb Plantation in Durham, North Carolina , have become small luxury hotels or bed and breakfasts . Not only Monticello and Mount Vernon but some 375 former plantation houses are museums that can be visited. There are examples in every Southern state. Centers of plantation life such as Natchez run plantation tours. Traditionally

13625-523: The upper South, like their counterparts in the North , barns had to provide basic shelter for the animals and storage of fodder . Unlike the upper regions, most plantations in the lower South did not have to provide substantial shelter to their animals during the winter. Animals were often kept in fattening pens with a simple shed for shelter, with the main barn or barns being utilized for crop storage or processing only. Stables were an essential type of barn on

13750-514: The whole. In recent decades, the TJF has created programs to more fully interpret the lives of slaves at Monticello. Beginning in 1993, researchers interviewed descendants of Monticello slaves for the Getting Word Project , a collection of oral history that provided much new insight into the lives of slaves at Monticello and their descendants. (Among findings were that no slaves adopted Jefferson as

13875-399: Was molded , dried, and then fired in a kiln . If a suitable stone was available, it was used. Tabby was often used on the southern Sea Islands . Few plantation structures have survived into the modern era, with the vast majority destroyed through natural disaster , neglect, or fire over the centuries. With the collapse of the plantation economy and subsequent Southern transition from

14000-470: Was a free-standing structure and at others it was attached to the main house by side-wings. It developed from the Acadian tradition of using the loft of the house as a bedroom for young men. A variety of domestic and lesser agricultural structures surrounded the main house on all plantations. Most plantations possessed some, if not all, of these outbuildings , often called dependencies, commonly arranged around

14125-456: Was a plantation chapel or church. These were built for a variety of reasons. In many cases the planter built a church or chapel for the use of the plantation slaves, although they usually recruited a white minister to conduct the services. Some were built to exclusively serve the plantation family, but many more were built to serve the family and others in the area who shared the same faith. This seems to be especially true with planters within

14250-402: Was a very labor-intensive crop to harvest, with the fibers having to be hand-picked from the bolls . This was coupled with the equally laborious removal of seeds from fiber by hand. Following the invention of the cotton gin , cotton plantations sprang up all over the South and cotton production soared, along with the expansion of slavery. Cotton also caused plantations to grow in size. During

14375-428: Was almost always in a separate building in the South until modern times, sometimes connected to the main house by a covered walkway. This separation was partially due to the cooking fire generating heat all day long in an already hot and humid climate. It also reduced the risk of fire. Indeed, on many plantations the cookhouse was built of brick while when the main house was of wood-frame construction. Another reason for

14500-487: Was an octagonal dome , which he placed above the west front of the building in place of a second-story portico. The room inside the dome was described by a visitor as "a noble and beautiful apartment," but it was rarely used—perhaps because it was hot in summer and cold in winter, or because it could be reached only by climbing a steep and very narrow flight of stairs. The dome room has now been restored to its appearance during Jefferson's lifetime, with "Mars yellow " walls and

14625-430: Was an overseer's house. The overseer was largely responsible for the success or failure of an estate, making sure that quotas were met and sometimes meting out punishment for infractions by the enslaved. The overseer was responsible for healthcare, with enslaved people and slave houses inspected routinely. He was also the record keeper of most crop inventories and held the keys to various storehouses. The overseer's house

14750-406: Was augmented by small outlying pavilions to the north and south. A row of outbuildings (dairy, a washhouse, store houses, a small nail factory, a joinery, etc.) and quarters for slaves ( log cabins ), known as Mulberry Row, lay nearby to the south. A stone weaver's cottage survives, as does the tall chimney of the joinery, and the foundations of other buildings. A cabin on Mulberry Row was, for a time,

14875-431: Was bought by Uriah P. Levy , a commodore in the U.S. Navy, for $ 2,500, (~$ 81,513 in 2023) who admired Jefferson and spent his own money to preserve the property. His nephew Jefferson Monroe Levy took over the property in 1879; he also invested considerable money to restore and preserve it. In 1923, Monroe Levy sold it for $ 500,000 (~$ 6.96 million in 2023) to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (TJF), which operates it as

15000-458: Was completed is of some dispute. In constructing and later reconstructing his home, Jefferson used a combination of free workers, indentured servants, and slaves. After his wife's death in 1782, Jefferson left Monticello in 1784 to serve as Minister of the United States to France. During his several years in Europe, he had an opportunity to see some of the classical buildings with which he had become acquainted from his reading, as well as to discover

15125-450: Was distasteful due to mineral content, the potable water on many plantations came from cisterns that were supplied with rainwater by a pipe from a rooftop catchment. These could be huge aboveground wooden barrels capped by metal domes, such as was often seen in Louisiana and coastal areas of Mississippi, or underground brick masonry domes or vaults, common in other areas. Some structures on plantations provided subsidiary functions; again,

15250-404: Was erected only at mealtimes, and beds were built into alcoves cut into thick walls that contain storage space. Jefferson's bed opens to two sides: to his cabinet (study) and to his bedroom (dressing room). In 2017, a room identified as Sally Hemings ' quarters at Monticello, adjacent to Jefferson's bedroom, was discovered in an archeological excavation. It will be restored and refurbished. This

15375-591: Was featured in Bob Vila 's A&E Network production, Guide to Historic Homes of America, in a tour which included Honeymoon Cottage and the Dome Room, which is open to the public during a limited number of tours each year. In 2014, Prestley Blake constructed a 10,000 sq ft (930 m) replica of Monticello in Somers, Connecticut . It can be seen on Route 186 also known as Hall Hill Road. The entrance pavilion of

15500-430: Was usually a modest dwelling, not far from the cabins of the enslaved workers. The overseer and his family, even when white and southern, did not freely mingle with the planter and his family. They were in a different social stratum than that of the owner and were expected to know their place. In village-type slave quarters on plantations with overseers, his house was usually at the head of the slave village rather than near

15625-405: Was utilized to preserve meat, usually pork , beef , and mutton . It was commonly built of hewn logs or brick. Following the slaughter in the fall or early winter, salt and sugar were applied to the meat at the beginning of the curing process, and then the meat was slowly dried and smoked in the smokehouse by a fire that did not add any heat to the smokehouse itself. If it was cool enough,

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