Behind the Scenes: Monticello's 2nd and 3rd Floors

Welcome to Monticello. My name is Steve Light. I'm the manager of house tours here at Monticello. And thank you for joining us for another Facebook live stream. You know, when visitors think about this home that we're in here today, they often think about some of the iconic spaces on the first floor of the home, the entrance hall set up as a museum, the parlor with its intricate beach and cherry parquet floors. And of course Jefferson's private study, what he called this cabinet, which reveals to us so much about his own personality. Even in Jefferson's time, many visitors who came here, and there were many, when they left primary source accounts of their visit here to Monticello, they focused those accounts on those iconic first floor spaces, which Jefferson really meant as a place to present himself to the public. They very rarely talked about these spaces that we'll be exploring today on the second and third floors of the home, nine bedrooms, family rooms, guest rooms, and of course the iconic dome room. These spaces were much less about the presentation to the public and much more about the private life and family life here at Monticello. This was where Jefferson's daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph raised her 11 children, educating them herself where his sister after her husband passed away and moved and continued to live throughout Jefferson's retirement. This is where enslaved African-Americans labored every day. Slave women like Priscilla Hemmings watching after Jefferson's grandchildren or Betty Brown and Critta Hemmings who were cleaning the floors and doing the laundry and even emptying the chamber pots. Young enslaved men like Israel Gillette carrying firewood up and down the steep and winding staircases to make sure the rooms were heated for the guests and family members here on cold winter days. So these spaces upstairs are places where we explore stories beyond Thomas Jefferson here at Monticello and learn about the people that surrounded him in his daily life here throughout his retirement. And we're happy to explore those spaces with you all today. Give you a sense for what these rarely seen spaces would have been like in Jefferson's time. Hi, I'm Carrie Subra and I'm standing here in the nursery at Monticello. This is one of the upstairs spaces. So I always think it's so interesting to think about the young children in here who likely made a lot of noise while Jefferson is downstairs writing, working, perhaps even meeting with someone in his cabinet, which was connected right to his library. But the people who would have spent time in this space were the Randolph children, Thomas Jefferson's grandchildren, because his daughter Martha and her husband Thomas Randolph were living here. They moved here in 1809 after Jefferson retired from the presidency. And so his really had the youngest grandchildren would have spent the most time in here. And they would have spent time with a woman named Priscilla Hemmings who was their enslaved nursemaid. But today we can really more think of her like an enslaved nanny, right? She's caring for everything that those children needed, nurturing them, most likely caring for them, not just physically, but also emotionally as well. And that probably was returned in many ways. We hear from Edmund Bacon, an overseer who mentions how close the Randolph children were to Priscilla Hemmings. She was married to John Hemmings as slaves. Their marriage would not have been recognized legally, but we are aware of it in part because of Thomas Jefferson's farm book and how he kept track of all of the enslaved families here at Monticello. However, he did not own Priscilla Hemmings. He did own John Hemmings. Priscilla Hemmings was owned by the woman whose children she was caring for by Martha Jefferson Randolph. And what that means is that Priscilla Hemmings has spent a lot of her marriage with John Hemmings separated from him. In fact, a big bulk of it, she would spend living at Edge Hill, which was the Randolph home. And of course she's caring for Randolph children there. And as I said earlier, moving here in 189 when Jefferson retired from the presidency and the Randolph family lived here full time. Priscilla Hemmings would spend the rest of her life living here at Monticello. And another thing that we know from one of the grandchildren is that they reflect later in life after Priscilla Hemmings has died and say, she showered us with a thousand little kindnesses. Many kind of at her own expense. Priscilla Hemmings did not have any children. And we don't know if that was on purpose or not. Is this a form of resistance? Think about what she's doing. She's caring for children, one of whom one day will likely own her. And did that play into why she and John Hemmings did not have children of their own? Priscilla Hemmings did not receive her legal freedom. She was given her time by Martha Jefferson after Thomas Jefferson's death. And sadly, shortly after Priscilla Hemmings would die in 1830. And by all accounts, especially from the Randolph grandchildren, we know that John Hemmings was devastated by her death. And so he in fact even carved a headstone in which he says, my dear affectionate wife. And this is the only gravestone that we know of here at Monticello that was for an enslaved person. So especially here in the nursery, we can really think about the dynamics and the complexities between the Jefferson and Randolph families, the free people living at Monticello and the enslaved community like Priscilla Hemmings. And as we think about the noise and the life happening here in the nursery downstairs, we have Thomas Jefferson working in his cabinet or even his library. Also being challenged on those complexities between the free and the enslaved in our country. Hi, I'm Dana Kelly and I'm standing here in the bedchamber of Jefferson's oldest daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph. She was actually born in the first building that Jefferson designed and had constructed here at Monticello. So it was, it was called the South Pavilion and it was just one room over a kitchen. And their first daughter, their first child, Martha was born almost exactly nine months after Jefferson and his wife had been married on New Year's day, 1772. And so she was named after her mother, Martha. But as a girl, she was called Patsy. She had a nickname. And a young Patsy Jefferson had to grow up rather quickly when she was only 10 years old because her mother died. And she witnessed her, the, her father really suffer a very profound and prolonged grieving period. And to cope, he would take long rides on his horse in the forest, accompanied by just one person. His, his 10 year old daughter Patsy was his sole and quiet companion on those ramblings. And I think from then on, she was really his emotional support for the rest of Jefferson's life. Many years later, he would, he would write about his daughter saying she was his cherished companion when he was young and his nurse in his old age. And that's really how it played out. Because if we fast forward now all the way to the year 1809, Patsy by then is known as Martha once again, and she's 37 years old and living nearby at her husband's plantation, Edge Hill, a few miles away. They had a large family, but her father retired from the presidency. Finally, he gets to come home. He's 66 years old and he gets to come back to his beloved Monticello, this great big house. And he needs essentially a housekeeper. And his daughter, Martha Randolph is just delighted, thrilled to move in with her big family and run this household for the rest of her father's life. So I believe this must have been her sanctuary, the place where she could finally get a moment to herself. We think initially her husband might've lived here with her, but he turned out to be a troubled sort of man, a difficult guy to live with. They're often estranged. So he ends up in a little room upstairs. So this is really Martha Jefferson's space. And she picked one of the best rooms in the house, I must say, because it's, it's well lit and she has this view to the South. She was a prolific letter writer. So she, I can imagine her sitting in that chair at that table, writing letters to her daughters who were, who were away. The bed here is like the one that she had as, as a girl in Paris, because after the Revolutionary War, after her mother had died, uh, Jefferson will be our minister to France. And so young Patsy Jefferson got to live in Paris on the eve of the French Revolution. Initially she would have slept in this alcove because Jefferson designs bed alcoves in most of the bedrooms. They weren't really very popular. And we know that his daughter long to have a freestanding bed because she wanted a closet. She wrote a letter when she was 49 years old to her daughter, Virginia, about how thrilled she was to finally have transformed her alcove bed into a closet. That took a lot of convincing of her father, Thomas Jefferson. Uh, she said to Virginia that he asked, she asked for permission to do that. And for a while, he just bore it in silence. I guess he's not answering, but she wrote, I gave it to him for breakfast, dinner, supper and breakfast again, until he gave up in despair at last. So he finally let his daughter have a freestanding bed and a walk-in closet. And who doesn't want a walk-in closet? But she fulfilled her duties for her father, her personality. people talked about her in a very positive, uh, words. I think she was a kind and patient, calm, highly intelligent, a good conversationalist, a great hostess. She put people at ease. One of the men who once been enslaved here, Isaac Granger Jefferson described Martha Randolph as a mighty, peaceable woman. Uh, I guess she'd have to be. I, I often think of her in today's terms. She is, she is stuck in the middle of that, you know, sandwich generation, taking care of so many people here, here at Monticello. Her father, um, once wrote, wrote this about her. My evening prospects now hang on the slender thread of a single life. And he was of course, referring to, to Martha, uh, who he depended on for his, his happiness. And, uh, she never let him down. I often think, um, she, if she was a thread, she was a thread made out of steel. Come join me in Jefferson's dome room. My name's Don McCracken. I'm one of the many guides here, and we love showing visitors to this magnificent space. And not many people get to come up here. It's a wonderful space. We get asked all the time, though, what was this room used for here at the top of Monticello? And there's really not a very good answer. It's first given to the oldest grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who has just been married. It's not a good newly wed bed. And they, they gave it up eventually. We think mostly just for grandkids to play and store furniture. It's a wonderful space. If you look behind me, you see these bullseye windows are set fairly high up on it. But if you get on that West lawn, they look perfectly proportioned. And many of us think this was mostly the scene from the outside. Jefferson just loved domes. He's got to have domes. He saw them in books like the Pantheon in Rome and, and in real life, he saw Hotel de Somme in Paris. And he's got a dome at Monticello. No one's built a dome here before in America. The only private house to have one. He made all the drawings and specs himself. A wonderful space. Had a green floor and this Mars yellow, we think the original color. Up above, there's an oculus and light pouring down. It's a wonderful space. The acoustics are not very good, but a wonderful space. It was never heated, never very practical. There were never balls and dances here. You never got a large groups of people up here, but a wonderful space for contemplation. And you see behind us, the windows are lower than the others. This is not part of the original plan of the house. The roof lines coming down behind. So the lower half of the windows are mirrors to fool the eye. And over the door behind us here, mirrored as well. It's not see-through glass. So this spectacular space, which we love showing off, as I mentioned, never a grand space at all. But in fact, a lot of us think it's the prettiest storage room in America. Jefferson's dome room. Hi, I'm Lucy Middlefort, Monticello's architectural conservator. And one of the great things about being on the third floor today is that we get to see and experience Monticello's amazing skylights. Here I am in on the third floor, and we've got an exposed set of weights here that show exactly how the skylight operates it. When these lead weights go down, the skylights open. One of my absolute favorite details on the second and third floors of Monticello is these holes in the doors that enter the attic. We get a lot of questions about these. What are they possibly for? And were they originally here? So amazingly, we've had some analysis done by a paint analyst, Susan Buck, who took samples from the interior of these holes. And she found the exact same graining sequence, the paint that makes the wood look like mahogany on the interior of these holes as on the interior of some of the doors that have original graining left. So this is an incredible discovery that shows that these holes are original. And in fact, what we know is that these holes were meant to allow cats to roam freely through the third floor in and out of the attics to catch rodents like rats. So this just shows that Jefferson knew that there would be rats and he had a, he had a way of dealing with it. And here you can see the evidence of the rats I just mentioned. The corner of the door is missing, which just goes to show that rats were chewing the corners of the doors all throughout the attic. For much of Monticello's history as a historic site, these spaces were not accessible to visitors. Even a decade ago, these spaces were not restored to look the way they did in Jefferson's time. And indeed how offices here at the Thomas Jefferson foundation. But over the last decade, there's been a tremendous amount of effort on behalf of our curators and restoration specialists to restore these spaces to the way they looked in Jefferson and his family's time so that now visitors can come and visit the second and third floors of the home and see the ways not just Jefferson lived here at Monticello, but his family members lived at Monticello and see the work that went into the daily life here at Monticello by some of the enslaved people who worked inside this house. Today visitors in the behind the scenes tours go through all three floors of the home through these spaces here on the second floor, like this bedroom and up to the third floor in the account and dome room. Hi, I am Lou Hatch and I am standing in the bedchamber of the second floor at Monticello where possibly one of Jefferson's widowed sisters would spend much of her 17 years at the end of her life. So who was Anne Scott Jefferson Marks? She was born at Chadwell a couple of miles from here and at the age of two, she and her twin brother lost their father. They were 20 when their mother died, at which point her older brother Thomas would essentially take over her financial needs. Not always doing so well with that either. And he would even do so some during her marriage. She did not marry until she was 32 years of age, quite late for that time. And it was to a man Hastings Marks, an aspiring local merchant. Unfortunately within two years business was not going well. He tried his hand at farming that did not do so well either and he lost much of his, sold much of his property and died 22 years into their marriage. So the year now is 1811, two years into Jefferson's retirement. He learns of his brother-in-law's death and sends for his sister Anne and she will remain here basically the rest of her life. We do know from family letters of Jefferson's daughter and grandchildren that they considered Aunt Marks basically what we would say today, a very busy buddy person into everybody's business. And a little bit of what we'd say today is a hypochondriac, always complaining about various illnesses. And this room served as essentially a efficiency for Aunt Marks. Since she's not well enough probably to go down the steep, narrow stairs, she would probably have a dumb waiter like you see over here holding some of her dishes for the meals that she'd be served in this room. We also know that during her last days, she's being tended to by an enslaved woman named Cilla. Cilla was seven years younger than Anne, but had been born on the same plantation so they knew each other since childhood. Thinking about the intertwined lives of those that are not only relying on Jefferson as a brother for their place and being, their wellbeing, but also for the enslaved and the intertwined lives that they had together. Hi, my name is Caitlin Bowes and I am a museum technician here at Monticello. I work in the curatorial department and I take care of the objects in the collection. We are standing in the Cutty. The Cutty is a very small attic space that is actually above the west pediment. And if you look outside the window here, you can see the west lawn. This space was primarily used as storage, but in 1823, two of Jefferson's granddaughters, Virginia and Cornelia Randolph commandeered the space and turned it into what they called a fairy palace. By the time Jefferson retired from the presidency, there were three generations of Jefferson family members living in the house. So it was a pretty bustling space because the Randolph granddaughters were educated at home. They needed a private and quiet space to write their letters and read their books from their grandfather's library. Virginia wrote a letter and she said that she would rather be in this space with the dirt daubers, the wasps and the bumblebees, and that the formidable rats hadn't discovered the space yet. So it goes to show how important privacy was to them. This space can be pretty challenging to take care of because we don't have environmental controls in here. Dramatic changes and fluctuations in temperature and humidity can be really harmful to objects such as wood. And therefore we are only able to display reproduction furniture in this space. Cornelia Randolph, Jefferson's granddaughter was the artist of the family. We would like to think that she probably came up here to escape and do some of her drawings up here. This is a reproduction of an original Cornelia drawing that we have in the collection. Many of you may know Monticello's West Front because that's the image that's on the nickel, but we don't always get to see what's behind that. And now you do. Hi, I'm Jolin Bain and I'm a restoration specialist here at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. I get to show you something really interesting today. Downstairs in the main body of the house, all the doors are faux wood grain. They're a faux finish, a trompe l'oeil. So the doors themselves are actually pine and then they've been painted to look like mahogany. And this is, this is a kind of a common practice of this era if you had money to pay for it. And this is, this is a real treat here because this is the only place in the house where the faux finish, the wood graining was never painted over. And so we have this example of the wood graining and this is what they used as a template to paint the doors downstairs in the house. So very interesting. The wood graining here is done like very realistically. And sometimes in this period, if you were painting a faux finish, it was exaggerated because you wanted to let people know that you had the money to have somebody come in and paint your doors or whatever it was, whether it's, you know, wood graining or marbling or something like that. And so this is, this is an absolute treat. And I'm kind of a, as a painter and somebody who does faux finishes, I'm, I'm a little protective of this. In the early 2000s there was a fellow by the name of Andrew Johnson who who used this as the template and painted all the doors that we have downstairs. Some were painted in place and some they took down to the shop and they, they put them up and let him work on those when they could take them out of the house and maybe put up a temporary door. So right here, you can, you can see the wood graining and stuff. It's kind of like a crotched mahogany and that kind of follows, follows these lines here. And this is kind of interesting. In some places you can actually see the, like here, you can see the wood grain of the the door that's behind it kind of showing through the pine. So right here you can see the base paint, which is like a yellow okra that's painted on. And then there are glazes put over top of it that are translucent to allow, like it creates an illusion of depth of the wood. Sometimes the, the the paint is painted on and blended out with something. It's called a badger blender to soften it. And then like in this area it's completely subtractive. So they've actually put the glaze in and come down and remove the glaze with like a tiny knife or sometimes it's almost like a little rubber spatula or eraser or something like that with a like straight edge to get that nice crispness. And here this would have been, the paint would have been put on and then taken off with like a rag or something to give it that nice kind of model pattern. Those are the layers. It's a base paint and then a glaze and then the graining on top of it. So once again, here's another one of my favorite places in, in the, in the attics. So where we are we're right behind the dome room. So this is the back of one of the walls of the dome. You can see an archway here. And another interesting thing is you can actually see the thickness of one of the walls here at Bonicello. I mean, this has got to be close to two feet thick. And it's really interesting. Again, you're seeing, you know, you're seeing the work of the craftsmen, you're seeing how the brick went together and everything like that. You can actually, you know, see the raw brick work on, on the back here. And again, you can see, you know, you can see the bones of that house. You can see how, you know, how the craftsmen put this this place together, you know, this beautiful house. Sometimes it's a little ugly on the inside, but I found it beautiful. You know, Bonicello is one historic site and one home, but many stories to tell. We hope you enjoyed tuning in for this Facebook live stream as we explored the second and third floors of the home and talked about some of the people that lived here and surrounded Thomas Jefferson throughout his retirement years. If you'd like to explore these spaces in the second and third floors in person, go to Bonicello's website www.bonicello.org and look up behind the scenes tours, which we offer and allows the chance for visitors to come not just to the first floor, but through all three floors of this incredible house.