The Men Who Built Monticello and Disappeared from the Story

The mountaintop was always occupied. Before Thomas Jefferson drew his first elevation sketch, before the first brick was fired in the kilns on Mulberry Row, before the dome went up and came down and went up again in a different form, people were already living and working on this mountain. Six hundred and seven of them, documented by name in the foundation's own research, enslaved across Jefferson's lifetime. That number is not an estimate. It is the result of decades of patient archival work by historians who went looking for names the official record never intended to preserve.

Jefferson enslaved people at Monticello, at his Bedford County property called Poplar Forest, and at several smaller farms. The majority of them never left his control. When he died in eighteen twenty-six, deeply in debt, one hundred and thirty enslaved people were sold at auction within months of his death to satisfy his creditors. Families that had lived together for generations were separated in an afternoon. The Hemings family, the Fossett family, the Grangers: these names are now in the database. They are there because the families themselves kept the stories, passing them down through generations until researchers came to write them down.

Mulberry Row was the industrial spine of the plantation, a corridor roughly a thousand feet long running along the mountain's south slope. In its prime it held a nailery where enslaved boys as young as ten drove nails for sale in a market economy. It held a joinery, a blacksmith shop, a textile workshop, a smokehouse, a stable, and the quarters where many enslaved workers lived. Archaeological excavation of Mulberry Row, which began seriously in the nineteen nineties and has continued since, has recovered objects the official record omitted: ceramics, buttons, coins, glass beads, evidence of the material lives of people the plantation account books reduced to labor units.

The Getting Word African American Oral History Project, launched by the Monticello Foundation in nineteen ninety-three, has conducted more than two hundred interviews with descendants of the enslaved Monticello community. The project's name comes from something that passed from generation to generation: the story of families waiting to get word from relatives sold away. Some never did. Others found each other across decades and state lines. The interviews are free online.

The shift this represents is not a footnote. For most of the twentieth century, tours of Monticello told visitors about the architecture, the inventions, the genius. The mountain had six hundred and seven people on it. They built what you are looking at. Their names are there now. The record is late, but it exists.