Milestones

Archaeologists begin to use Thomas Jefferson’s 1796 Mutual Assurance Plat, an insurance document detailing all of the storehouses, workshops, and dwellings on Mulberry Row, as a guide to understanding slavery at Monticello. Using this plat, Harvard graduate student Oriel Pi-Sunyer uses a trenching technique to conduct archaeological excavations along the western half of Mulberry Row. Pi-Sunyer locates three buried structures – the “blacksmith and nailer’s shop” (building D), an “addition” to the nailery (building j), and a “store house for nailrod and other iron” (building l). He also excavates the remains of the “joiner’s shop” (building C).

Then Monticello curator, James A. Bear, Jr., edits Jefferson at Monticello: Recollections of a Monticello Slave and a Monticello Overseer (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press), which contains recollections by Monticello overseer Edmund Bacon and enslaved blacksmith Isaac Granger Jefferson. Granger’s memoir was one of 4 memoirs published by former Monticello slaves. Peter Fossett, Israel Jefferson, and Madison Hemings also recorded their memoirs in the late 19th century.

Monticello’s Executive Director, James A. Bear, Jr., and researcher Lucia Stanton begin transcribing and annotating Jefferson’s account books, known has his Memorandum Books. Although not completed until 1997, Bear and Stanton's extensive research greatly enhances Monticello’s understanding of the work, locations, families, and lives of enslaved people, as well as their relationship with Jefferson. Stanton goes on to devote the next 40 years of her career at Monticello to studying the lives of the 607 people owned by Jefferson in his lifetime.

Relying on the earlier excavations of Pi-Sunyer in addition to Jefferson’s 1796 plat, Dr. William Kelso begins more extensive excavations of Mulberry Row using a cross-trenching technique. Kelso locates nine additional structures on Mulberry Row, including the remains of 3 slave dwellings not detailed on Jefferson’s original plat. Serving as Director of Archaeology from 1979 to 1993, Kelso explained his Mulberry Row findings in Archaeology at Monticello (Monticello Monograph Series, 1997).

Monticello staff historians Lucia Stanton and Dianne Swann-Wright launch the Getting Word African American Oral History Project, a groundbreaking project that has preserved and recorded interviews with nearly 200 descendants of Monticello's enslaved community. The oral histories of Getting Word become an integral part of the Monticello slavery tours, also launched in 1993 and taken by nearly 100,000 people each year. Slavery tours are offered on the mountaintop; nearly 100,000 people take these tours each year.

Monticello publishes "Slavery at Monticello" (Monticello Monograph Series) by Lucia Stanton, the first monograph to illuminate African American life on Jefferson’s plantation.

Over 100 descendants of the enslaved community who also participated in the Getting Word oral history project gather on the Monticello mountaintop to celebrate their ancestors.

DNA tests conducted by Dr. Eugene Foster and a team of geneticists establish a genetic link between male-line descendants of the Jefferson and Hemings families. Foster and his team publish their finding in the scientific journal Nature.

Monticello publishes "Free Some Day: The African-American Families of Monticello," by Lucia Stanton. Stanton’s book illuminates the previously little-known lives and community of the Hemings, Hern, Granger, Gillette, and Hubbard slave families. The "Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings," published by a panel of Monticello staff, reports that based on oral and written historical documents, statistical studies, and DNA evidence, it is highly probable that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings’s children.