Thomas Jefferson Poplar Forest

Production funding for Thomas Jefferson's popular forest was provided by the Burn Carter Foundation. I write to you from a place 90 miles from Monticello, near the New London of this state, which I visit three or four times a year. I stay from a fortnight to a month at a time. I have fixed myself comfortably, keep some books here, bring others occasionally, and in the solitude of the hermit and quite at leisure to attend to my absent friends. I find friendship to be like wine: raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man's milk and restorative cordial. -- Thomas Jefferson. The name is the oldest part of the property. We know from a plat in 1745

that it was Poplar Forest Tract. And we think it came from the groves of poplar trees that were here on the property. Jefferson actually didn't name it Poplar Forest, but he kept the name when he inherited the property. Thomas Jefferson and his wife, Martha, inherited the property from her father, John Wales in 1773. It was a 4,812-acre plantation, a working tobacco plantation when they aquired it. During his second term as president in Washington, Jefferson began the process of building Poplar Forest. He sent down an Irish brick mason, Hugh Chisholm, to the property to start preparing the ground and making the bricks, an estimated 240,000 bricks for the house. Jefferson came down in 1806 from Washington to help with the laying of the foundation. As an unusual octagonal foundation, he had written a letter to Martha, his daughter, saying that Hugh Chisholm wasn't equal to the task of laying the foundation. So he helped and assisted with that when on his trip. It took Jefferson three days by

carriage and two days by ho,rseback to come to Poplar Forest from Monticello. It's a 90-mile journey, and that journey took him through Appomattox, Buckingham Courthouse, through Campbell County. It was almost through the back entrance to Poplar Forest that he usually arrived on the property. Jefferson visited the property year round, usually three or four times a year, often at the change of seasons. He came in the dead of winter when there were two-and-a-half inches of snow on the ground. He came at Christmas. He also came in the heat of the summer when it was 95 degrees. He enjoyed the property year round and also really was very interested in the management of the plantation and when the crops were ready for market and when they were going into the ground. So it was beneficial to him to come down and check things out all year round. On the plantation of Poplar Forest, Jefferson cultivated tobacco, corn, wheat. They had a dairy here where they made butter for both plantations, here and Monticello. They also had hogs. They raised all sorts of small crops like timothy, oats, pumpkins to feed the

hogs, a variety of things. This was a self-sufficient plantation. In 1845 there was a fire here at the house at Poplar Forest, and the roof was burning, collapsed into the lower level, and burned all the wood and glass components out of the house. And the family who owned it -- the Hutter family, they were the family who ownd it after Jefferson's family sold it. They rebuilt the house in a very short period of time. They had a family they needed to move back in. So when they rebuilt it, they did not redesign it the way that Jefferson had intended with the skylight and the gutter and ridge construction of the roof, any of the ornamental details on the outside. But they built it on more of a Greek Revival style. Even in the early going before we'd begun, you could sense Thomas Jefferson here. You could sense that you'd found something exciting, that you had stumbled on or discovered something that had true lasting value, and that warranted

the effort it would take to save it. Poplar Forest offers us a means as our tangible link to Thomas Jefferson, a means of understanding him better, of thinking about and remembering him. And in that sense we need that link to our past for better understanding of where we've come from. And with a man like Thomas Jefferson, his ideas are still relevant. They're not simply ideas that date from his time, relevant only to his time. So it's a way to better understand him and think about him and think about the things that he felt were important that are still indeed important to us. Basically we approached the project gradually following the logical steps involved in any preservation project. The first step was purchasing the property. We had to purchase it in segments as it became on the market to secure back the different portions of Jefferson's land that had passed into other ownership. From there we've gone on to secure and pay for additional parcels of land

amounting to a total of five hundred acres. The note burning which we witnessed today is symbolic of returning this special house to Jefferson, the Jefferson who was the inventor, the creator, the farmer, the architect, the statesman, the man who in our nation's infancy believed in her people and in her democracy. This vision of the founders of the board of the Corporation for Jefferson's Poplar Forest is an example of boldness and a willingness to take chances. It's not easy to borrow the amount of money that was necessary to begin this project and even more difficult to pay it back. And as this project moves towards completion, the enormity of your task will be realized and appreciated by more and more people. The next step after acquisition was stabilization, and stabilization's purpose was to make sure that the resources did not deteriorate while we secured the funds to be able to move into restoration. The house needed stabilization. In addition, the

other original buildings that Jefferson found necessary needed stabilization, and the trees, the oldest poplars that dated from Jefferson's time. The first stage of the project was to investigate the conditions on the outside. What we want to do is to keep the water out as much as possible. This is a drawing made by the Historic American Building Survey which we've reduced about 50 percent. And on this drawing are a big array of numbers. And these are codes to a database that we put in the computer, and we can sort it out by type of defect and by type of material. We can see down here that there are some salts developing on the outside. As the moisture-laden salt water comes to the surface and evaporates, it leaves that salt on the surface. That's salt can be a problem.

It hasn't caused much deterioration yet. We're also looking for places in the wall where there are holes in the mortar, and we want to make sure that those can be plugged up to help us dry. The wall itself is like a sponge. It soaks up the water as it comes down. But in dry weather like it is today, it will aspirate the water. And we want to make sure that we don't do anything that keeps the wall from breathing, just like a human organism. We have problems with the paint deterioration here. And the purpose of paint on this surface, especially on sky-facing surfaces, we want to keep the ultaviolet rays away from the wood itself. That's the main purpose of the paint protection. Now we're trying to see what's going on on the inside. We're using moisture -- electronic moisture meters so we can record the

surface humidity. Water is the process that destroys most structures. Without being too destructive, we're trying to determine where moisture may be coming through from the outside. This instrument measures the moisture which may be between the two pins. This is about 8.1 percent. We'll take a reading at each -- at each intersection. Then we'll draw contours like on a contour map. That will lead us to the places of highest moisture and where we're possibly getting a leak from the outside. Then we'll be able to develop a treatment which will reduce the moisture. The purpose of our work. Now is the exterior stabilization. It's very important too to remember is that that is quite different than restoration work. Ah, what we are doing is preventing further

deterioration of the buildings. For instance the roof that we have on this house is a temporary asphalt [will] roof and in the last time I was out on a rainy day I counted many many leaks and that kind of thing has to be. attended to as part of this work. And and once again it's to keep active deterioration, um, from happening. So that we can buy time for the ultimate restoration. Our masonry work is part of the stabilization work. Um, is to to keep, once again, to keep water out is our directive and that means any open holes in the masonry walls we will point up with a new mortar and any any brick that have fully deteriorated. We are replacing and also any mortar joints that have eroded away greater than half inch depth we are, we are pointing. We are using a very soft mortar that will last the

duration of the research but is easily reversible we can take it out to cut it out in the future and the mortar that we're using is a pure white so it is immediately distinguishable from the historic mortar and in fact a replacement brick that we're using to replace a damaged brick is a wire cut modern brick that is readily distinguishable as a as a modern element. So once again for the stabilization work we have created a, a envelope that will not allow water to penetrate but we have clearly identified our work for future researchers. The way we're doing the paint and it's typical of all our work here is we want to be sure we have a good protective layer of paint on the building but yet we want to retain what is existing. The approach is the method is to simply scrape off off the paint that is loose that is flaking and is not stable anyway.

And then to put in a layer of shellac. And then to put on a final finish coat. The difference between this and what will be done in normal restoration or even normal painting work is that we are not attempting to sand down the existing paint and feather the edges so that they blend in and we're not attempting to remove all the paint or strip the paint as some people might do with a historic property. We are very conscious of the fact we have to maintain and keep anything that's existing on the building here for future researchers. The shellac layer what that does is help helps to identify to future researchers what we've done. It acts as a divider. Well the research is is the major step, ah the first half of restoration to the time when you you gather the knowledge you need so that you know what needs to be

put back and exactly how. There in the case of Poplar Forest, We have progressed through the research stage for the buildings but are still in the research phase or at Jefferson's ornamental landscape and his plantation landscape. We basically have the interior of a house that dated from the 1840s in the sense that the family that lived in the house at that time it redid the interior following that of the damage that it had been caused by fire and they redid it in what was then the fashionable mode of the Greek Revival style so we had largely the the superficial features of a Greek revival house. And yet as we peel back the layers we found the evidence we thought about what Jefferson's house was truly like. But the details. In this particular area. We know from the Jefferson document that he had a garden that was 80 yard square somewhere on the property there was no drawing to tell us where it is but that it connected to a stable

which we don't know where the exactly that is but we have found here we're beginning to uncover in this test excavation of the foundation stones to have some kind of an out building. And it may be that this is the stable if we can we can determine that then I think this will in turn lead us to the garden. And that's just the kind of thing that we're doing here. Well in 86 we were testing more of the landscape and the outbuildings and since then the project has focused on the main house specifically. And I guess the main, the most important, in that sense the most important find that we that we come up with so far is the the original cellar floor we found was still intact beneath a modern wooden floor and beneath several layers of dust and dirt that accumulated over the years. The floor in the house to me was exciting because as we began to clean it off we noticed that most

of it was consisted of special bricks that were only used an octagonal houses and octagonal buildings and in that so many of were used there and so it was just sort of we knew that we were dealing with a floor that was laid down with the construction of the house it was not something later on. And I guess the octagon is so innovative and Jefferson was one of the few people that would take that on is as a you know house construction and for [me] for obvious reasons they had to make special bricks to make octagonal houses so it was a little off the beaten you know off the standard construction materials and there it was you know it was all still in place. People have been not knowing it was there for a century and a half and it wasn't very deep. You know there boom right away were there. I have an excellent house there and pumps of the [belief] fixed and attended have a few good neighbors. And past my time there in tranquility and retirement much adapted to my age and independence

independence. Thomas Jefferson. Project is so significant, historically and architecturally. We really consider it as the the most model of project as we can conceive on a national level. And because of that we're we're going through all of the phases and. Techniques and methods and the best way possible. And that really requires going slowly and step by step way in order to evaluate the the evidence so that. You don't rush in and destroy something that could be important later. The term architectural archaeology is just sort of a new term for. An older process that's it's always been associated with house restorations and that's the process.

Investigating the fabric of a house. All houses that evolved over time have layers of. Of a Paint or plaster or trim and the process of archaeology in a house isn't really any different from archaeology out on the ground. It perhaps means you have vertical layers that you go through like a wall rather than horizontal layers on the ground. But it's a process of documenting everything before you go through it because sometimes you have to destroy a particular layer as you look underneath it. So you have to first do a lot of work to determine what appears to be modern or more recent. And the process is to go down to the earliest layer so that you understand what's original and what's not. When you're talking about Jefferson there are always unique things and.

The very intriguing things about this project. Probably the basic fact is that Jefferson used it for a private house. It wasn't really meant to be in the public limelight and Architecturally and in landscape design they are the real intellectual question is, 'What did he do in private that he didn't do in public'? Corporation right from the beginning, has dedicated itself to conducting the most thorough and scholarly restoration of a building that could possibly be done to that end we have to apply only the most up to date techniques in conservation. The first two years most of the laboratory work was dedicated to understanding the materials that were used in the construction by identifying the materials and various components of them. We were able to,

through comparative analysis, determine when specific areas were built when certain activities took place phases of construction. Things like that. Paint was something we began working on quite early because much of our recording of the building is based on the sequence of painted surfaces. In this case all the wood trim around and we identified anywhere from seven to nine layers of paint which are typical of the period after the fire. This particular board from the lower level of the house has two additional layers of paint. A lovely green color. Copper acetate green, [Verdant green]. And then a Spanish brown below it. Those two colors are rarely if ever used after the 40s. They're very typical of what might have been used in the Jefferson period and they're also very typical of colors. And he would have used in his buildings the

green is almost identical to the one they've just put on the floor at Monticello now. So we haven't really followed up in developing. A paint sequence for this building at all it's simply a matter of developing a series of sequences that we can compare one to another. And thereby have a record of how the house was put together. Again, early on we found, um, Jefferson mortars mortarsand in this case from Poplar forest and the sand is a very very light colored sand. Um, our early analysis in breaking down the mortar, we found the sand in the fines or the impurities that were in the mortar as well. And once we had identified these then it was a matter of trying to determine where we could find them, where they came from originally. Typically, um, Masons at that time would get sand from the streams that were flowing in the streams and use it for their plaster work. None of the

streams within a five mile radius of poplar forest rendered anything even reasonably close. This is probably some of the closest from the nearby streams. And it's totally wrong for our purposes. What we did find however is right on the property, as a matter of fact, in Northfield, in the plow zone, eh during rainstorms some of this sand would be washing out on the surface of the soil. So we did find deposits of it and we were able to mine, if you will, by digging and washing the sand which matched the original really quite closely. This hasn't been screened yet but it's by color it's really quite a good match. The House as we now know it from the research has a lot of missing parts that you don't see today like a balustrade around the roof. A Chinese railing on the very top of the roof where the skylight

was. The windows are all higher in the walls of the house and entabletures are larger. It's a it makes more sense visually as well as architecturally with all of its parts back together. Today when you look at it it does not say I'm a Jefferson building except in its Octagonal shape. So that the whole look of the House will look different on the outside. On the inside the major changes that the the central square room should actually be a cube. It should not only be 20 feet square but 20 feet high and that should have a 16 foot long skylight so that the volume inside will be the major change and they had the details on the outside will be the major change.

We did a systematic investigation of the House starting with the surface and then working beneath the surface through all the layers of different owners. When we started, you couldn't touch any Jeffersonian material on the inside of the House and what we did was we peeled back the layers of additions and alterations and got back to all Jefferson material in the house. It's a process just like the archaeologists except their peeling away the horizontal layers in the ground. We were peeling back the vertical layers in the house. Found far more than we expected. There are many details that we could expect like the placement of pieces of trim, baseboards, chair-rails, entablatures. We were able to confirm where the bed alcoves were attached to the wall. Places where the front

hall walls have moved farther apart. Places where walls or stairs were inserted. Places where stairs were removed. Probably the biggest significance of the entire investigation is is what the whole place looks like with the pieces all together. We never imagined how all these things would fit together so perfectly. And right now we can see it on paper through some reconstructed drawings and we can see it in our minds but we really have to put it back together for the public to understand how perfect it is. The other thing that comes out of Poplar Forest is it's really one of the first works of American architecture in the country because Jefferson is pulling things from the ancient Romans. From the Renaissance Italians. From 18th century British books. From his years in Paris

and the late 18th century and and then using Virginia materials. He's he's putting a creation together that's never been created before. And it's you can sort of think of it as a melting pot creation of the best of civilization. That whole idea of America inheriting the world, is really in this building. And before that, no one had blended all parts of of a civilized architecture and culture together. So he, this is really one of his best statements which represents the first of a real American architecture. I have this summer built a wing of offices one hundred and ten feet long in the manner of those at Monticello. With a flat roof in the level of the floor of the house.

In 1814 Jefferson added in the manor of Monticello, as he put it. A wing of offices outbuildings probably servants quarters kitchen dairy. A string of utility building. Right on to the house right on to the east house, east side of the house. And the records are fairly clear that this work was carried out but when you look at it today you don't see that anymore it is disappear above ground except for maybe a surviving section of the kitchen and dairy. And we have excavated between the House and the surviving dependencies and found indeed found the foundations of that wing and the foundations within the brick paving are beginning to show us where how the space is divided up with what the actual plan was. And we hope before we're done to be able to tell what functions were you in each room served in the office. There's no record of that. What's become known on these plantations as the kitchen yard tends to hold a lot of in the way of

artifacts. And there we might find fragments of the interior fabric of the house that was removed after the fire in 1845. And we have yet really haven't begin to begun to find artifacts in the Jefferson period we had we're not we're just starting we're not quite that deep into the into the outbuilding sites but the kitchen yard should be loaded and this is where people always asking 'Where does Thomas Jefferson throw his trash'?. You know I mean where it where they must have hauled it away right. No, the answer is no. They typically put them in these utility yards and just scattered it out over the side and it was done in Monticello on each side of the house. And I'm - I suspect, it's the same will be the same situation of Poplar Forest. Forest. We've spent about three years excavating the wing and are continuing to work in the kitchen yard which is the area right outside of the wing. In front of where the kitchen was and what we found is the layout of the rooms the room plan in the wing. We had contrasting evidence one letter Jefferson says he built a wing 100 and 10 feet long a later reference by

John Hemmings who is a carpenter who actually built parts of the wing so it was 100 feet long. So we established architecturally that it was indeed 100 feet. Jefferson made a mistake. Unbeknownst to, [laughs] later for people until we excavated. And then within that hundred foot long wing, we found the layout of each individual room we think the first room was a dairy or a cold storage space. We found no evidence of a fireplace or any kind of heat in the next room was the kitchen, the room after that was the cook's room where we think, Hannah, Jefferson's cook lived, and probably did all kinds of other activities. And then the final room was a smoke house. And by excavating each one of these rooms we found out how the rooms were arranged we found a number of artifacts that are giving us some ideas about what was going on in the rooms. We found a variety of artifacts including ceramic fragments and marbles, pins, nails, glass. Anything that you can imagine we found here at poplar forest. Over 3000 animal bones were found in the course of those excavations. So we've been working on the last several months going through the animal bones to identify what we have and

interpreting in what this can tell us about Jefferson's life here at Poplar Forest. What we're finding is a squirrel, a possum, ah, raccoon. Also we find a variety of fowl including chicken which we know he was buying from the slaves. Young turkey, young ducks, pheasants, partridge, grouse. Even a blue jay and a robin which were considered to be edible birds at that time even today we don't consider eating a blue jay. Artifacts come in here and we see them basically is, is information to tell us about the past. And um, we wash everything and we catalog it we have a computerized cataloging system so we can keep track of everything we have and then the nicer things go into study cabinets where they are accessible to other scholars or to people who are interested in coming and seeing them for exhibit purposes. We look at some of the things from the wing of offices we get a different view of Jefferson. I had worked at went to Monticello before I came here and I was at first a little surprised at the sort of informality of the artifacts here. Jefferson was still interested in eating off fine dinnerware and keeping a house that is his

granddaughter to describe was done in the tastiest manner. But he wasn't entertaining at the level he was in Monticello when he wasn't trying to impress anybody outside of his immediate family. So we have things that are just like a notch below what the highest level ceramics in glassware would be. You see Jefferson a little bit more, you know, relaxed or a little bit less interested in public display here. One of our kind of unique pieces is a is a fork that we have that's a bone handled fork that's been dyed the handles been dyed green to imitate Jade and that was a fairly popular style sort of nicer tableware for the period and we can envision Jefferson eating off of that. Right under his granddaughter's window when we were digging, we found part of a slate pencil and there's a wonderful letter where Jefferson's granddaughter writes home and says my pencil is broken can you send me another one and you can just imagine her sort of throwing it out the window so we found some some things that are kind of big picture things and then some things that are real specific items. I think one of the more exciting things that we found in the past five years is an area where some of the slaves were living on the property on the eastern edge of our property.

It's an undocumented site. It dates from the late 18th early 19th century and it shows what life was like here in the period before Jefferson built his retreat house and also spans the bridge from the pre-retreat house to the period right after the house was finished. And so the site kind of represents what Jefferson had to work with in terms of landscape. And labor force and the people that were living there contributed to constructing the House and the landscaping the grounds and to doing all the agricultural things that went on on the plantation. So we've learned a little bit more about slave life we learned a little bit more about the early landscape of the property and then something about what Jefferson was thinking about when he got here and how he changed things and reorganized the landscape. We found a lot of Ceramics which tell us about how people were eating how they were preparing food. We found a number of adornment items which I think are pretty interesting buttons and beads and buckles that tell us something about how people chose to set themselves apart. And then we found a number of stone pipes that are made of a local stone called schist, it's like soapstone and this is probably our best example they're little elbow shaped pipes. They would have been

smoked with the reed stem. And we found several examples that are nearly whole and a lot of fragmentary pieces and we weren't sure when we first found them where they were coming from or even if they were historic because we do have some prehistoric artifacts mixed in on the site. But then we found more of them in layers and features that were definitely dating from the time that slaves were living there. And then we found this little piece which is we think a piece of stone that was being worked sort of a preform for this and as it was being made they were drilling a hole through this segment of the pipe and it broke off and so they threw it away. But this is a pipe in process. So not only have we found an interesting kind of pipe but we think we found evidence that the slaves living on the site were actually making these and that is a pretty rare example of handicrafts a lot of the material culture from slavery was made with perishable things so it was a lot of textile quilting going on probably basket making working in leather and wood but all of that stuff doesn't survive archaeologically. So only things like stone or pottery survived. And another interesting thing that we found and people at other

sites are finding the same sorts of things as well are padlocks and keys. And when you think of slaves by definition they are they our owned. They are not seen as independent people that can own their own things but in fact we think that the slaves that lived here did acquire personal possessions and had things that they wanted to keep private and to keep safe. And so we found padlocks and keys all around the Quarter site and that also indicates that there is some agreement on the level of the overseer on Jefferson that people are allowed their space and that's been knowledged both ways. In point of soil, climate and a substantial thrift, thrift and good neighborhood, I think it the finest part of Virginia. Traditionally house museums have focused on the building themselves and you see these hives as standing in kind of magnificent isolation and people have no real sense of the context the house was built in. And here a proper forest especially the context is very important because Jefferson designed this house not as a house standing in the middle of an emptiness but is a house that was really

integrated into the landscape. And if you go out and look at the house you can see that there are thin mounds were constructed and he connected those mounds to the house by tree's initially and later on by the wing. And he meant the house very much to be integrated physically with the landscape and for the whole scheme not just the house alone but for the whole house. Trees, mounts, garden lawn etc. to be seen as one design statement and without verifying what that design was them were guessing at what it looked like so it's necessary to go and look for those details to make it all make sense. What he did was he developed a house and a core area of about five acres around the house that really made a statement as to what he wanted Poplar Forest to be it was his retreat, a place to get away from the crowds that followed him from Washington to Monticello when he tried to retire so his landscape really reflected the privacy that he wanted. He created a circular drive that was encompassed by trees on either side and then a fence line and that and it really made a barrier it put him in here at ease with his family and the only way to view the other plantings that were

within that area was to be within the layers of plantings that he had and the only way to get there was through invitation. So it really reflects what Jefferson's whole ideal of the retreat was. These circles all indicate planting features. There are holes when a plant or anything is put in the ground as the hole is dug out and soil is replaced. To put the plant in there it leaves a very different kind of soil in the ground and we're able to find these even though the trees either died or were yanked out years later we're able to see the evidence of that in the ground. We have a lot of documentation about the landscape. Jefferson was absent a lot of the time when things were happening here in between visits he'd write letters to his overseer and say plants something or put a fence here and so we have a good documentary archive that talks about the landscape five acres around the house was very at least in his mind's eye was very green very living place. Over time he changed his mind and so we have some documents that tell us to plant three different kinds of things within the space of two years in a certain place

and one of our challenges if we do want to restore the landscape as accurately as we can is to find out which of those decisions was carried out and how successful those plantings were. And so we're doing that by excavating areas looking for planting remains looking for the actual remains of the plants in some cases we find root evidence because these plants were fairly recently put in it's not even been 200 years yet there are remnants sometimes of roots. So and one of the clumps we found remnants of roots of dogwood and red bud which are two of the species that Jefferson directed that we planted there. And then we also are finding. Sort of microscopic plant remains which are called phytoliths and they're little silicas. Plants absorb silica through the water as they as they drink from the ground and the silica precipitate out any of their roots or their stems or their leaves and then they fall back into the ground as they're inside the plant they take on the shape of the plant cells. And so there are people that look at these microscopically and can come and tell you that within a reasonable level of accuracy what kinds of plants grew there. So we're working on doing that again to

try and verify the documents and to try and see if Jefferson changed his mind. When finished it will be the best dwelling house in the state. More proportion to the faculties of the private citizen. Thomas Jefferson. It's taken a long time to get to this stage because we have so many different tasks to accomplish. If we were going to restore and preserve this property at the right way. Our first challenge of course was simply buying the land that was rapidly disappearing to intense development in this part of Edward county. Once we had that begun that process begun then we could work on getting ready for the ultimate restoration and that process of getting ready has has been a very intensive a very professional State of the Art process. Very we've pursued very careful steps along the way doing an intense investigation and fascinating detective work

to STATE OF THE ART standards so that we could be sure that once we did find the data we knew we needed we could produce an accurate restoration of Jefferson's design. When I first came to Poplar Forest, you could see the basics of Jefferson's design but you could not see so many of the details and features that made it truly intrinsically his concept his design. And that's the part that we're bringing back now. When we started working on the house it was really a combination of changes from the 1840s on the interior overlaid with modernization from the 1940s and the five bathrooms the kitchens the closets and where you could really see Jefferson the most was probably on the exterior but that even that we knew had changes. And so it was really a matter of of trying to see through a somewhat modernized Jefferson House and and to begin to

understand what was new and what was old. The nice thing about this house is that it was never restored in a museum since before we started it. And that gave us a lot more original clues to examine and some of those are what we call ghost marks. In fact I I tell people the house is filled with ghost stories. But it's an architectural ghost that that we look for and that's where things had been attached to walls. It's where things were put on and taken off. Where paint might've gotten on to the brick from a piece that's missing or where plaster and wood came together. One of the things we're having to do is put together the exterior skin in a very careful way. And that's because we want to keep as many original bricks in as many original mortar joints as we can but sometimes for structural

reasons we have to take things apart and put them back together. So if we take a brick out that is a Jefferson brick it goes back into the exact place that it came from and in some cases we even have to glue broken bricks back together. That's that's how important it is to keep the original fabric and so on the stair pavilion which is one of the trickiest things we've tackled, we've had to take apart as little as possible and then put it back in the same way. Also restoring the mortar and the opening and shortly will be putting in the restored fan window that goes in the two stair pavilions. The central room is something that's very important to restore. It's not only a cube a 20 foot cube within the the larger octagon of the house but there are three real important things about that

room that means something to Jefferson and means something to all of us and I restored way. One thing is just returning that middle room to its proper size. What that does is it gives us the rotunda house that Jefferson had always wanted with a larger room surrounded by shorter rooms. And this is going back to one of Jefferson's favorite architects Andrea Palladio from the Renaissance. And Jefferson had always wanted this and finally achieved it here in his retirement. The other real important thing in the middle room is the construction of the roof, which is a it's called a terra- ross roof. And it's again something Jefferson adapted from probably something seen in Europe but it was his way of getting a flat roof that drain water. And we've authentically reconstructed this using dovetails and Morris and tin and construction

and that is very important because Jefferson was very detailed on how things were put together not just what they look like and what they meant but the actual construction technology was something he was always improving upon. And then the third thing that's really important in that middle room is not only the skylight which makes it a very light fill room which otherwise would be very dark. But it's the decoration. There's an entablature that Jefferson invented in the sense because he combined two parts from Roman examples that never existed together except in this one room. And so in this one space and in the entire world is a very unique piece of architecture that Jefferson made up and had for his own enjoyment. Putting the exterior back together we've relied on as many historic

techniques as possible in. Putting back the roof framing it's a heavy timber frame structure with mortise and tenon and the dovetail joints and large pieces of wood. Every part of the house had gone back together had been on view to the public so we've made it an educational experience and we've had an extraordinary group of craftsmen who have really dedicated part of their lives to making this very accurate and working in the spirit of doing it correctly authentically. And all this is part of the interpretive experience for the visitor to see it being done correctly and then seeing the finished product done authentically. One of the significant things about finishing the exterior is to put all the pieces back together that Jefferson designed and constructed. And one of the things that we can do now is look back at Jefferson's life to see what those pieces might mean. The missing pediment and

parts of the exterior that have been missing for about 150 years were very important that Jefferson. The pediment on the south was a feature that he picks up from his British architectural books. The British interpreting that feature through Palladio who's interpreting Roman farms. And so all these things have little threads that run back through Jefferson's life and his work. Part of the roof work involved doing the technology of Jefferson in the way of the gutter system which is a built in gutter on the roof. But in order to get the water off the roof we've had to put it back his technology using lead pipes and because that sort of an old world technology we had to find some English trained workers who could put the lead flashings around the chimneys and put the lead pipes together that go down the outside of the wall to get the water off

the roof. Basically we're hanging lead down pipe as opposed to sheet metal down pipe and flashing all the chimneys in lead. It's a rare way of doing them. Nowadays. The modern way of doing it would be to cut them just cut and weld them together. Stoudemire, yeah which is a, it's a quick and strong job but it's a quick job this way is how it was done because they wouldn't have wired equipment in Jackson's time. And this is the way it would have been done in them days so that's how they want it done now. Bending of the lead pipe you do over like say a pipe or whatnot and then you drag wooden bobbins through. As the bodbins are pulled through it stretches the opposite side of the pipe and makes it smooth and round and it's kind of tedious processes a lot more time consuming than the way we do it now. One of the most important features of the exterior was putting back the stucco covering on the brick columns. There are four columns on the front four on the back. Those are Tuscan order columns and they

had gotten pretty beat up over the years since Jefferson and they had been rebuilt in incorrectly and so we took the later covering off analyzed them. Did a lot of research on the actual materials that Jefferson used he was using a type of stucco that imitated the color of stone which of course is what he's imitating by covering the brick columns. That was a real lost art that we had to figure out how to do which is to run the moldings around the brick moldings, run the stucco so that it all looked like a carved and a single piece of stone when it was finished. One of the other features of the exterior relates to the interior is restoring the windows and doors. These have all been researched and the details are accurate. The materials are accurate. We've used some antique walnut for the window

sash that Jefferson says should just be varnished on the inside and painted on the outside because he said the inside has a richer look if it was just varnish. On the exterior of those windows will have louvered blinds as they call them. Four blinds per window. Those we've determined or a very practical part of the house but they also give the house a very different look because Jefferson specified that they be painted a grass green and we have a documented color of that green in it. It is a very vivid green that will now be seen against the palette of the red brick of the cream colored mortar and the warm white of the trim. So all this together well will give a nice architectural color to the house. This spring we've just finished the entire roof which is a major accomplishment. Having worked

on the house from the ground up we've put the finishing touches on the House by restoring the classical entablature and balustrade that runs around the top of the wall which really is one of the most important architectural features of the exterior because Jefferson was so particular about his architectural details. And then capping off the roof we put on a Jeffersonian technology that's very unusual which is a tin coated shingle which was something that he was very interested in as a better product. He's always looking for something better to do to make a house last longer and just be better in construction. And we put these 10 shingles on and then on the very top of the house where the cube room sticks up through the roof we've finished the deck that runs around the skylight and then capped it all off with this wonderful Chinese railing which looks like an

architectural crown sitting on the head of the house. The next phase will be to move forward with the highest priorities in each aspect of the Project. For the house that means moving to first into the interior structural restoration. And that's going to encompass things like the masonry restoration of walls doorways fireplaces. It also means that the restoration of the of the floors. We would also like to move forward as quickly as we can installing appropriate mechanical systems for the house because those systems are going to be enormously helpful in sustaining the preservation of the building fabric. In addition we would like this next phase to be our opportunity for the first phase of implementing Landscape Restoration. It will be a first segment and we're targeting these Jefferson South Lawn as the area to be to be our first step in the actual Landscape Restoration. We still have excavation to do before

then. To determine all the details that we need before we need to step forward and do the actual implementation of Jefferson's landscape. In the next phase in addition we would like to address the East Wing that's been missing for a long period of time and has much to say about the various support services that made this house function as it did. We would like to reconstruct the wing and open up a window into what Jefferson called his wing of offices. In addition we were also going to be trying to build and gradually build the endowment that will be needed to protect all this restoration that's happening. We were warned in the early going that we had in our hands a piece of world class architecture and that we had only one chance to do it right. And doing it right meant handling it carefully and not destroying the fragile evidence that was in the building and in the grounds as far as the grounds restoration goes.

So that we captured the evidence that was that Jefferson had left behind. Once we have the bad information then we needed to face the hurdle of raising the funds to carry out the restoration. And finding a team of people. The best people we could find so that we indeed could carry out the best possible restoration. Befitting the architect on Thomas Jefferson. It had to be a state of the art restoration. I think he would be very pleased that so many people appreciate this place that was so important to him. That so many people have put a great deal of effort and caring into trying to preserve it and bring it back. We are able indeed frequent to walk down the staircase onto that

terrace and after like supper in the evening that a is our usual delight to take a perambulation about the terrace on the side of the house. And indeed to see all of the mountains and the scenery there to the east east lit up with the setting sun from the West. And the later the evening becomes, my granddaughter's Cornelia, Ellen and I, find that if we sally forth frequently along with the bats and the owls. Like. We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are

are created equal. Production funding for Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest was provided by the Burn Carter Foundation.