POPLAR FOREST

by
Francis H. Straus II

Delivered to The Chicago Literary Club
October 8, 2001

A penny for your thoughts. Well inflation has come, a nickel for your thoughts. Not a buffalo nickel but a Jefferson nickel. There were two great intellectuals helping to found our country, Jefferson and Adams. With the great flurry of interest in Adams this year because of Manchester's biography, I believe Jefferson's star needs some emphasis to keep the two in balance. Washington was a patient man and a great leader but not an intellectual and Franklin was a fine business man and scientist, but also not an intellectual. Slightly later proteges of Jefferson were Madison and Monroe and they were capable thinkers. In this presentation I wish to focus on Thomas Jefferson, his education, some of the good things he did and an emphasis on his interests in art, architecture, music and writing.

Thomas Jefferson was a hybrid with a frontier Virginian father, whose family came from Wales, and a tidewater and culturally more elite mother whose Randolph family had descended from English-Scottish ancestors going back to Alfred the Great and Charlemagne.

Our Thomas Jefferson was the fourth with that name. The first, his great grandfather, had come to the Virginia colony in 1619. His grandfather Thomas II owned 800 acres in Henrico County mostly gained from a governors issue as a result of bringing indentured servants into the colony.

Thomas III was Jefferson's uncle and he died at sea. His father believed in primogeniture, with the eldest son inheriting everything, so Peter Jefferson, the second son, had been given little education but strongly believed in taking up patents on frontier Virginia land. Because of his elder brother's death Peter did inherit his father's western lands, but the original plantation was given up to repay debts.

Peter moved west to the Rivianna River in Goochland County where he started clearing forest and building a small Virginia wooden house. There was a front door in the middle and another door on the back side. When both were opened in the warm summer a soft breeze helped to cool the house. Peter was self-taught, mastering reading, writing, accounting, map making and surveying. He surveyed portions of the northern and southern boundries of the Virginia colony, as well as helping to produce the best map of Virginia at that time. One of Peter's few neighbors on the frontier, William Randolph, introduced him to his cousin Jane. In 1739 Jane and Peter were married, and they named Peter's homestead Shadwell after the London Parish where Jane Randolph had been born. Peter acquired 200 acres of adjacent hilly farm land from William Randolph just across the Rivianna River from Shadwell for a large bowl of arrack punch and an additional 200 acres for cash. This purchase would be the future site of Monticello. Peter and Jane Jefferson first had two daughters and then, in 1743, a son whom they named Thomas. Goochland County was then divided into Albemarle and Augusta Counties.

At this time William Randolph died leaving instructions that his close friend Peter Jefferson was to be the resident executor of his estate at "Tuckahoe" in tidewater Virginia, near Richmond. So Peter took his family to Tuckahoe. Thomas was two years old and his first memory was of being on a pillow, carried by a trusted slave, riding a horse the many miles east to this new home. William Randolph had two motherless children when he died and had asked that they not be sent away for school so Peter hired an Episcopal minister to teach the children at Tuckahoe. Thomas reported later that he had spent his early childhood playing games with a mixture of similarly aged slave children and master's children. Only when he started school to learn his reading, writing and arithmetic were the slave children separated and held back not getting any education. The teacher of this grammar school was a poor teacher and spent much time and energy on religion so young Thomas followed his self-taught father's example and started reading his father's library of forty books which included Shakespeare and the Bible. His father was home when he was not out surveying, and taught Thomas penmanship and a love of nature in all its vastness. Thomas learned to swim, ride, fish and stalk game. He was not well coordinated but he loved to ride and learned to ride well. Peter taught his son to be strong in body so as to be strong and free in spirit and to be self reliant. Besides this closeness to his father Thomas was very attached to his eldest sister Jane who was three years older than he. She encourage his reading and they were naturalists together. Jane was learning to sing and Thomas developed a taste for music from her.

Seven years after coming to Tuckahoe Peter had completed his task as resident executor and the family returned to Shadwell. Thomas was nine years old. The house was too small as there were now six children, so Shadwell was enlarged to a larger rectangular two story building with a front to back hallway, parlor and master bedroom on each side and children's beds upstairs with sloping ceilings and dormer windows. Sheds, kitchen and other out buildings were in two elongate buildings on either side of the driveway being U shaped wings at right angles to the ends of the house.

Thomas was now sent away to school where he learned French and to read Latin and Greek. He would come home weekends often with a school friend. The school food was bad and the minister teacher was very uninspiring. One weekend when home at Shadwell Thomas' father handed him a gun and asked him to bring home a wild turkey for dinner. After a long unsuccessful search for such a bird he found one in a pen. He took it out, tied it to a tree, shot it, and carried it home for dinner. Jefferson only admitted this to his grandchildren many years later.

At this time in his life Jefferson learned country dances, reels and minuets. This inspired him to learn to play the violin. He was mostly self-taught and soon he was competent enough to accompany his older sister when she sang.

When Thomas Jefferson was fourteen his father died at age forty nine, leaving a widow and eight children, two of whom were boys. The father's seven thousand five hundred acres were divided between them. Thomas was left his father's forty volume library, a bookcase, surveying tools, mathematical instruments, and his father's wish that he would continue with the classical education which the father had been denied.

The awkward shy son was devastated by his father's death. He had been much closer to his father than to his mother whom he thought entertained too much and spent too much. Thomas withdrew into his reading and violin playing. He did have the legal council of his five executors but Shadwell was run by his mother and Thomas began to call it his mother's house.

Before his father's death Thomas had been enrolled in a new school fourteen miles from Shadwell run by Mr. James Maury, a displaced Huegonot offering a classical education to eight boys besides his own eight children for 22 pounds sterling each per year paid in tobacco. He ran his plantation, was minister in his parish, taught school and named his slaves Cato, Clio, Ajax, Aggy and Memnon. He was the first good teacher and father figure in Jefferson's life. Maury taught precise language skills and emphasized not using extra words. Jefferson was reading extensively out of his teacher's 400 book library, and Jefferson began to express himself in a vigorous succinct manner, trying to emulate his teacher's fine style. Maury taught careful analysis of each author noting the literary steps that the author took to accomplish his aim. He also taught caution, patience and self discipline. Two years passed for Jefferson caught between a demanding mother and an excellent surrogate father teacher. As he progressed through this phase of his education he was reading 14 hours a day.

In the spring of 1760. when Washington was running his tidewater plantation after the French and Indian war, Franklin was already retired and Adams was five years beyond his Harvard graduation, Jefferson crossed one hundred and twenty five miles of Virginia moving from the frontier with its cruder culture to tidewater Virginia with its fancier clothes, better language and more culture. The brick and clapboard buildings of Williamsburg were impressive to Jefferson. He was on his way to enrollment at William and Mary for his college education. One non clergy faculty member, Dr. Small, had come from Scotland to teach physics, metaphysics and mathematics but in fact he taught everything. Jefferson and Dr. Small developed a close relationship. Dr. Small brought the Enlightenment to Jefferson, strengthening his science, mathematics and moral philosophy. They worked on scientific experiments which showed how objective observation of facts could lead to new understanding of natural science. They had long hours of discussion covering Jefferson's very active reading which included the French writers Moliere, Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot. He was often reading 15 hours a day and later said "it is when we are young that the habit of industry is developed, if not then, then never". He recommended Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Locke's essays, Bolingbroke's 5 volume political philosophy, Hume's history of England and the Bible. He hiked, ran, swam and rode for exercise and had three classmate friends who had come from Maury's school: John Page, Dabney Carr and Jack Walker, as well as a roommate John Tyler, the father of a future president of the United States, who was jealous of Jefferson's violin playing ability.

Professor Small introduced Jefferson to his Williamsburg friend George Wythe, the leading and most scholarly lawyer in the capital. And when Jefferson finished his college education in 1762, he began his legal education under Wythe's oversight. At this time one could study a few months, then pass the county bar examination and practice in the county court system, but Jefferson wished to practice in the higher General Court in Williamsburg. This preparation under Wythe's direction meant carefully reading Coke's Commentaries recording English Common Law from the Magna Carta onwards. This immense task took most of a year. Wythe brought the Enlightenment to teaching law, treating legal problems like scientific problems and using scientific methods to win cases. In most apprenticeships the practicing lawyer would ask the student to carry his books, do the investigating work and copy the actions of the teacher. Wythe felt strongly that the student should read all about Common Law in a prescribed order, then later when that was mastered follow the teacher to court and see what happened there. Wythe was always well dressed and polished, teaching Jefferson correctness and good conduct as well as industry and loyalty. They both loved the classics, discussing Elizabethan and Restoration literature, natural philosophy, laws of nations, and natural rights. This became another strong relationship and was the fourth major teacher in Jefferson's development. The first was his father, the second Maury, the third Small and now the fourth and last was Wythe. Wythe later taught John Marshall and Henry Clay but when he died he left his library to Jefferson.

After Coke, Jefferson's reading went on to Francis Bacon and Blackstone. He would get up at 5 a.m. reading ethics, religion and natural law until 8 a.m. After breakfast he read philosophy and law, then after lunch Greek and Roman history, and the history of Great Britain and Virginia. Finally in the evening he read Euripides, Sheridan, Homer and Cicero. Some days he would observe court activity. For five years, 1762 to 1767, Jefferson followed this prescribed program to learn the law, preferring to emphasize rational approaches, while rejecting metaphysics, speculation, and theological control of the law.

In the summer of 1765 his oldest sister and closest sibling, then 25 years old, died of small pox. As had happened after his father's death Jefferson was greatly saddened. He retreated into his books and studies, continuing to study under Mr. Wythe in Williamsburg for two more years, and became a great believer in small pox immunization. This can be compared to Patrick Henry who studied for six months to pass the lower court's bar exam. It is noteworthy that Wythe, one of Henry's examiners, did not pass him. In 1767 Jefferson passed both the county court's bar exam and the higher General Court's bar exam with flying colors.

One year after starting his practice he signed an agreement to level 250 square feet on top of the hill across the Rivianna River from Shadwell. This was the start of Monticello. He also bought an Italian violin for five pounds. Remember that in all his education he had had no formal training in the arts other than writing. Any knowledge he had of art, architecture, or music came from his own reading and experience, not from any outside instruction. And as yet he had seen very little of the fine arts, only what was present in Williamsburg.

Meanwhile, in this post Seven Years War period impoverished England began a series of Parliamentary acts to increase tax revenues from the colonies to help pay the war debt and support the increased military needed to protect its empire. This started in 1763 with the Currency Act, then the Stamp Act in 1765. Jefferson heard Patrick Henry's speech in the Virginia House of Burgesses in which he resolved that colonists were the only ones who could tax colonists. In response Governor Fauquier dissolved the House of Burgesses.

A new English governor, Baron de Botetourt, was appointed. He called for a new election of the House of Burgesses. Jefferson ran for election and won, gaining what had been his father's seat in the House. The following spring he took the oath of office and was asked by the Speaker, his cousin Peyton Randolph, to write the answer to the Governor's introduction. Jefferson's answer was humble and succinct, ending with his wish for the Governor's long continuance in office as a happy ruler of a free and happy people. Jefferson was on three committees, wrote a lot, spoke very little. He tended to side with the more liberal element in the House resisting the Quartering Act which required colonists to house British troops and provide food and support for them. The House of Burgesses voted not to admit that Parliament could override them and that they were opposed to laws which raised revenues by regulating external trade. Up to this time the Virginians had thought of themselves as colonists and the Indians as the native Americans, but now with the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Virginia finding the British taxations and control oppressive, the colonists were beginning to call themselves "Americans" instead of colonists.

Nine days after Jefferson became a Virginia lawmaker the Governor dissolved the House of Burgesses even before a budget had been voted on, because the House was belittling Parliament and the King. The now extralegal Assembly, the representatives of the people, marched down the Williamsburg street to the Apollo room of the Raleigh Tavern . Here they agreed to bar the importation and consumption of British goods. Washington led this action. The list of banned imports was long and life in Virginia was to become more austere. The twenty-six year old Jefferson was the sixteenth to sign this resolution. Forever afterwards the British considered him a dangerous troublemaker.

In February 1770 Shadwell caught fire and burned to the ground. No one was hurt in the fire, but most of Jefferson's growing library, correspondence and clothes were lost. Only his violin was saved. A few books were with him in Williamsburg when it happened, but he lost all of his law notes, the 40 volumes he had inherited from his father and the account books he needed to bill his clients for legal work. We do know that during the seven years of his law practice Jefferson earned very little because of his poorly paid billings. In the spring Jefferson's mother and remaining siblings moved to live with her brother, Sir John Randolph, on his plantation. Jefferson never rebuilt Shadwell and decided to develop Monticello as his home.

Before Shadwell burned Jefferson had levelled the hilltop at Monticello, planted trees on the hill sides, and started making bricks. Now he speeded up work on the hill top and within the year started building the one room square south pavillion. Disdaining rambling English tidewater rural architecture, he envisaged a revival of classic Roman architecture as had been used in Italy at the time of the Renaissance, ala Palladio. The south pavillion was finished at the end of summer 1770 and the main house begun. Jefferson produced all the plans using his imagination and pattern books for Palladian style villas, planning a stylish country house for a single gentleman. It was a 24 by 28 foot central two story block with two straight seventeen foot wings, the east being a master bedroom and the west a dining room. In the center of the first floor was an entrance hall with a parlor behind, and a library and two bedrooms upstairs. The classical portico would have four columns. Then he went on to design the outbuildings, the kitchen, privy, laundry, storehouse and workshops. His architectural drawings were very precise reflecting his compulsive personality. Jefferson left Palladio far behind when he planned his outbuildings inset against the hill, running back at right angles from the ends of the house, and reached by roofed corridors connected to the main corridor in the lower level of the big house. It was a very imaginative plan which worked well and was entirely his own even though he had had no formal training and was only twenty six years old.

In the fall of 1770 he moved into the one room south pavillion, being his sitting room, kitchen, bedroom, and study combined. Problems with England were somewhat quieter but the Townsend duties, the Declaratory acts and the tea tax still remained. The boycott of English imports had not really worked.

With a dwelling of his own albeit very small, Jefferson picked up his social life in Williamsburg and met a beautiful young widow Martha Wayles Skelton. She was slight with large eyes and auburn hair and loved to talk, play the harpsichord and ride. Jefferson was smitten and courted her strenuously, since she was the daughter of a wealthy planter and had many suitors. This courtship went on for two years. Martha was won over by Jefferson, and finally, on New Year's Day 1772, Martha married Thomas. Their first daughter, Martha, was born the following September. She was always called Patsy.

Jefferson's law practice was interesting but not remunerative, while his involvement in the colony and its association with the other colonies to develop some freedom from the English Parliament now became the stronger interest. He gave his practice to a nephew, worked on his new house, and went to Williamsburg or Richmond for colony assemblies.

At first Jefferson thought Parliament's taxation and other interference in Virginia internal affairs were the main problems but by 1775 he realized the King was also a negative factor as far as freedom for the colony was concerned. At this time Boston was shut down and New York was having difficulties continuing its trade. Then Lexington and Concord were attacked. Virginia voted to develop its own county militia along with light horse companies. Jefferson wrote a nine paragraph answer to the new Governor Dinsmore's ultimatum to the Virginians to return stolen guns, adopt Lord North's plan and reopen the courts. Jefferson's answer said there could no longer be a distinctive internal and external regulation of the colony by the mother country, the colonists were entitled to free trade with the entire world. Parliament had no authority to intermeddle with any facet of colonial life. Then Jefferson was sent to Philadelphia to be a Virginia representative at the 2nd Continental Congress. Soon after he got there the Battle of Bunker Hill took place.

In 1775 Jefferson's second daughter Jane died. Jefferson had her buried at Monticello next to her aunt Jane, the smallpox victim. Jefferson went back to Philadelphia and the Congress while Governor Dinsmore left Williamsburg to live on a British war ship in Chesapeake Bay. There were several armed skirmishes won by the Governor but finally the Virginia militia won the biggest skirmish. The British responded by burning Norfolk.

In May 1776 Jefferson again made the twelve day trip north to Philadelphia while the old Virginia House of Burgesses met for the last time in Williamburg and did not adjourn but let the body die. It was the oldest Royal Government in the New World, 257 years old. Those who had been the burgesses now met with others outside the capital and resolved that the union which had hitherto subsisted between Great Britain and the Virginia colony was hereby totally dissolved and the Virginians were discharged from any allegiance to the Crown. It was further urged that this resolution be sent to the Continental Congress and thus Virginia was the first colony to urge the Congress to break with Britain.

Actually the break was needed to begin developing foreign help for the coming struggle and the opening of foreign ports to American ships. Jefferson worried that a declaration of independence might cause some of the middle colonies to drop out of the Congress which would be more off-setting than lack of foreign aid. Still the proponents for independence were determined and a five member committee was named to prepare a formal Declaration. According to Adams, Adams and Jefferson were appointed to write a draft. The two discussed what to do next. Adams told Jefferson he should write it. Jefferson asked his reasons and Adams responded "first, a Virginian should write it, second, I am obnoxious and unpopular and you are not, third, you can write ten times better than I can." Jefferson, however, never admitted that this conversation took place and said that the five person committee asked him to write it. He wrote the Declaration as a legal document and used phrases from his draft of a Virginia constitution which denounced the King.

Jefferson used known and evident truths to develop logical conclusions for the Declaration of Independence requested by the Continental Congress. This scientific approach he had learned from Dr. Small in college. Adams and Franklin reviewed the draft and changed only an occasional word but in the Congress they discussed every phrase cutting out the whole section defaming the King of England for protecting and nurturing the slave trade because the Southern colonies were for slavery. Jefferson was very unhappy about these changes and wanted to get back to Virginia to be with his family and work on Virginia's constitution.

Soon after returning to Monticello Jefferson with his wife and daughter headed to Williamsburg so he could take his seat in the new Virginia Assembly and rewrite the Virginia constituion. He worked hard, seeing enacted 126 new laws in three years thereby generating one of the most far-reaching legislative reforms ever accomplished by a single person. They included repeal of laws of entail and primogeniture, pushed free public education, liberalized the penal code, and streamlined the judicial system. An area Jefferson struggled with was freedom of religion. Before the Revolution a man could be jailed for three years if he did not practice the Episcopal religion. This important freedom took ten years to finally pass the Virginia Assembly, when Jefferson was already in France and Madison had to inform him of its final passage.

A committee to develop a new legal system was established which included Jefferson and Wythe. They recognized it would be very difficult to change English Common Law, but they could simplify it and modernize the language to make it plain and understandable. Jefferson wanted to include an anti-slavery bill but he only managed to pass a ban on any further importation of slaves. Later he tried to generate a bill saying all slaves born in Virginia after passage of the bill would be freed and receive public education, but this plan never passed.

In May 1777 the Jeffersons had a son who lived for only three weeks, and the next summer they had a daughter named Maria who did survive. By early 1779 the British had surrendered at Saratoga and the French had joined in a treaty with the United States against Great Britain. So far the war had left Virginia in relative peace, but then five thousand captured British and Hessian troops from Saratoga were marched 700 miles from Boston to Charlottesville. Suddenly Jefferson, the Lieutenant of Albemarle County, had to build barracks and feed these prisoners of war.

By June 1779 at age thirty six Jefferson was elected Governor of Virginia. It was a close race and he edged out his college friend John Page by 67 to 61 votes. At the time eleven Virginia battalions were fighting with Washington and they had most of the usable firearms, while in Virginia the British blockade kept the tobacco in and prevented arms from being landed from outside. Virginia had no navy to protect its intricate coast line. Paper money was becoming worthless and tax payments almost non-existent. Jefferson did gather some funds by selling unclaimed western Virginia land to people wishing to move west. He also secretly supported the military efforts of George Rogers Clark in his Midwest offensive during the Revolution. This action was discussed last year in a paper about Clark Street.

In Jefferson's second term as Governor things got even worse when Benedict Arnold as a British general invaded up the James River to Richmond. They were really after the Virginia legislature and Jefferson, but the legislature had gotten out of town just in time. Jefferson tried unsuccessfully to organize some resistance, then headed west, moving the Virginia government to Charlottesville. It was a discouraging time for Jefferson as his wife was very depressed after the death of their four month old daughter Lucy Elizabeth.

In May 1781, Cornwallis invaded Virginia getting to Richmond and sending his dragoon leader after Jefferson. A Virginia militia officer heard of this plan while sitting in a tavern and rode all night to Monticello to warn Jefferson, who with his wife and two daughters headed south in his fastest carriage. The raiders reached Monticello when Hemings, the butler, and Caesar, a slave, were hiding the silver under the front porch planks. Hemings pushed the silver and Caesar under the floor replacing the planks in time to cover the hiding place. Caesar stayed with the silver for 18 hours before he was let out after the British had left. The soldiers did not damage the house but burnt all the barns with stored production of the years before. They took most of the farm animals to eat and destroyed all the plantation fences. The total loss to Jefferson was 3,700 pounds, about $350,000 at today's prices. Jefferson and his family went ninety miles south to a plantation he owned called Poplar Forest staying there for six weeks. Soon Jefferson was criticized for running away and not getting the militia out in time to withstand the attack.

Jefferson withdrew from the political scene when his term was over and went back to Monticello where he compiled a two hundred page draft of his answers to 23 questions Marbois, a French diplomat, had asked about Virginia. This turned out to be one of the best descriptions of American flora, fauna, geology, and natural history yet written. In the text he specifically challenged de Buffon, a French naturalist, who proposed that a degenerative process was at work causing North American animal species to be smaller in size and less vigorous than those of Europe. Jefferson pointed out that the elk was bigger than European deer and the American cow was a ton heavier than its European equivalent. He included Virginia history, wrote about roads, architecture, Indians, African-Americans, farming, manufacturing, and government. This ended up being Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, his first book.

After the Battle of Yorktown the military actions of the Revolution came to an end. Jefferson went to Richmond to defend his behavior as Governor and his critics were silent. The proposal of "unmerited censure" was rescinded and the Assembly praised Jefferson for his actions.

In May 1782, following the birth of a very large baby girl, who survived into childhood but died while Jefferson was in France, Mrs. Jefferson's health suffered a sharp decline. Jefferson's fellow legislators in Richmond urged him to come and carry out his duties as a representive from Albemarle County but he stayed at Montocello nursing his wife as she lost weight and then died. His wife asked him not to marry again as she did not want her daughters to be raised by a stepmother as she had been, and he agreed to her request. With her death the music and joy went out of Jefferson's life.

A year later Madison and Wythe initiated a celebration for him in Williamsburg when he received a Doctor of Civil Laws honorary degree from William and Mary. This raised Jefferson's spirits and he began to think of further revisions and strengthening of Virginia laws.

By the fall of 1783 Jefferson was reelected to the Continental Congress and began pushing for a firm and well-conceived constitution under which the new country could grow. The peace treaty had doubled the size of colonial America because of George Rogers Clark's military activity during the Revolution and Jefferson laid out plans for organizing the newly gained lands between the coastal States and the Mississippi River. Jefferson also wanted all new states or territories to be free of slavery or unwanted servitude but Congress did not approve this idea, it fell one vote short of passage.

In May of 1784 John Jay resigned as one of two ministers to France. Congress appointed Jefferson with the added duties of negotiating treaties of commerce with sixteen European states. He was happy to go to Paris with his daughter Patsy. A year later Franklin came home and Adams was sent to London so Jefferson became the ambassador to France. After living six years in Paris, travelling to England, Holland, Germany, southern France and Italy, he came home to be President Washington's Secretary of State. After returning from France Jefferson revised and enlarged Monticello adding more rooms in front and on the second floor. This required much replanning and rebuilding of parts of the house.

Following Washington's terms as President, Jefferson ran for the office and came in second thus becoming vice president under President Adams. He believed the Federalists were on the wrong track so four years later ran for President again, barely beating Aaron Burr in a House vote following the tied Electoral College vote. As President in 1800 he had great success fighting the Barbary Coast pirates, purchasing the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon, and organizing the Lewis and Clark expedition. His second term was less impressive as the British attacked our ships to punish seamen who had deserted their service. Thomas Jefferson would be very pleased to retire from public life in 1808 and worry about his debts, his plantations and his family.

Jefferson and his wife owned several thousand acres of gently hilly red clay Piedmont land, partly Thomas' inheritance from his father Peter and mostly land his wife inherited from her father. This land was Poplar Forest, ninety miles south and a little west of Monticello. It was south of the James River after it came through the Blue Ridge Mountains. It took about three days journey by horseback, cart or carriage to get from Monticello to Poplar Forest. Jefferson had first visited Poplar Forest in 1773 after his father-in-law's death when as executor he was studying the land holdings. He liked the appearance of these farming lands and probably decided then to develop them some day.

His second visit was the unanticipated one in 1781 when Jefferson was escaping from the British invasion of Virginia with their expressed purpose of capturing him as the Governor. He had managed to elude them by staying in the Poplar Forest overseer's house with his wife and two daughters for six weeks. During this time Jefferson described the Peaks of Otter visible to the southwest of Poplar Forest as the tallest peaks in the United States at 4000 feet. Later he retracted that when larger mountains were described and then when he was 73 years old he himself accurately measured the Peaks of Otter as only 2,947 feet.

Recognizing the potential fertility of the soil, Jefferson sent more slaves to Poplar Forest to increase its production of cash crops like tobacco, and he did try to grow other crops like wheat which was less labor-intensive and less depleting of the soil. In fact Jefferson did not personally revisit Poplar Forest for almost 20 years, during the time he was in the Continental Congress, rewriting the Virginia constitution, living in France, and on his return being Secretary of State and Vice President.

In May 1800 Jefferson finally got back to Poplar Forest but only for a week. It rained a great deal so he spent the uninterrupted time trying to figure out how long it would take to repay the national debt. His conclusion was eighteen years even if taxes were reduced so this became part of his campaign that fall for the presidency.

By the time of his second term as President, Jefferson realized that when he left Washington for Monticello many people knew where to find him so Monticello did not get him away from a busy life of visits and requests. He began to realize he needed a more unknown retreat and decided it should be Poplar Forest. The house should be small, architecturally pleasing, and built as a villa retreat with only two bedrooms to minimize guests. The first plan for his Popular Forest house was four rooms on the main floor, an octagonal entrance salon with a four-pillared portico in front, behind this a good sized square parlor and two long rectangular bedrooms on either side of the central two rooms. Two little circular stairways were to be built into the triangles where the octagon walls met the rectangular parlor shape. Laundry and kitchen would be built outside as separate structures.

Besides needing a retreat to escape to, Jefferson still had about $10,000 in personal debts and realized that income from Poplar Forest crops was his best chance of repaying those debts . This would require close supervision so it was a second reason to build a house there. Something Jefferson did not seem to appreciate was that if he sold the Poplar Forest lands and never spent money building a house, he would have been debt free. Building this house put him into further debt.

A long time before, sometime in his Williamsburg days, Jefferson had conceived of a plan for a small chapel either at William and Mary or on town land. It was a pure octagon with porticoes on each of four faces and a central altar inside with eight groups of seat rows. This structure was never built but does show that Jefferson thought highly of octagons. Now when thinking of a house design he again thought of a pure octagon.

A German architect, Becker, had designed an octagonal garden temple and this was published in a book in 1798. We know Jefferson had a copy of this book. The pure octagon house Jefferson finally designed had a central square room, which was to be the dining room, and a simple interior design with 45 degree walls placed directly from the corners of the central square room out to the middle of four of the octagon side walls. This left four rooms around the central square room. Through the middle of the northern of these rooms he put a hall going from the front door to the central dining room and from it to the parlor beyond, leaving two smaller rooms on each side of the front hall. Then he added a four columned veranda outside the parlor and two little rectangular stairwells to the basement outside the east and west facing exterior walls. The front door faced north, the parlor and veranda faced south and the middle light deficient room was to have a skylight to help illuminate its space. It was odd that food from the outside kitchen needed to be brought into the basement level, up the tiny staircase into a bedroom before reaching the dining room. Remember this was to be a villa retreat, not a functional house. The owner leaves his practical house and responsibilities to be at his villa with its imaginative relaxed atmosphere.

In September 1805 President Jefferson sent Chisolm, who was a brickmaker, a bricklayer, a carpenter, and man of all trades to Poplar Forest to start building the house described above. In June 1806 Jefferson was called to Poplar Forest by Chisolm to help lay out the foundations since each angle required an exact 45 degrees. Most of the previous nine months had been spent digging out the dirt in order to start the octagonal foundation wall made of limestone blocks. Brick making had also already begun. Most were regular rectangular bricks. Some were squint bricks. These are five-sided with a small 45 degree angle face cut from one of the front corners of a rectangular brick. Then a 90 degree angle was cut from the end of the 45 degree face to the back removing a larger triangle from the back brick corner. These bricks would be used at all eight corners of the outside walls.

In 1806 President Jefferson was welcoming Merryweather Lewis, his friend and previous private secretary, back from the Lewis and Clark Expedition. At the same time he was ordering wooden window frames from James Dinsmore, a craftsman at Monticello, for Poplar Forest. The house walls were still being built and the south veranda was well started.

By the end of Jefferson's presidency the house walls were finished, the roof had been framed and covered with boards but not shingled. The two brick octagon privies had been built on each side of the house. A specially hired slave Phil had singlehandedly excavated the south lawn area so that the house appeared two storied from the south side and the parlor had a superb view out towards the Peaks of Otter. This descending lawn was 100 by 400 feet and represented Phil's thousands of wheelbarrow loads brought to the east and west sides of the house where the extra dirt formed high mounds screening the privies from the house. Inside the house the floors were not finished, and lathing and plastering hardly started. Window frames were mostly in but no windows yet. It is interesting that Johnny Hemings, a slave doing carpentry and joiner work, was paid fifteen dollars a month while Chisolm and his brother, Virginia citizens, earned twenty dollars a month making and laying brick.

In retirement Jefferson planned about four trips a year to Poplar Forest, each lasting from a fortnight to a month. He oversaw finishing the house and began to plant trees and flowers for the landscaping. Writing Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia in 1811 he said that he "had some books at Poplar Forest and had the solitude of a hermit and am quite at leisure to do what I want. It is clear Poplar Forest was his retreat, not a summer house, which he visited in all seasons of the year.

Plastering was held up by the war of 1812 when plaster was very scarce but Jefferson went on with planting berry bushes, willows, several different kinds of poplars, aspens, mulberries, locusts, redbuds, and dogwoods. A double row of mulberries was to be planted between the lateral stair wells and the dirt mounds but Jefferson found that Phil had put the west mound ten feet further out than the east mound which was also a little south of the lateral line originally intended. Paid slave labor did an immense amount of work but it was hard to get the mounds in the exact right place.

A local workman continued working on the house's interior and exterior, billing Jefferson for framing, skirting, shingling, flooring the loft , making and hanging five double doors, and building trap doors and window sills. Now that the house was finally getting finished, almost ten years after it was started, Jefferson wanted a four room wing built out from the east side of the house with the north side of the wing buried in ground, and the south side having doors, windows and a covered corridor as were the work rooms at Monticello. These rooms would be for a kitchen, a storeroom dairy, a cook's living space and furthest out, a smokehouse room. Above these rooms was to be a flat terrace roof lined by a white rail fence. Hugh Chisolm was brought back to build this whole wing as well as plaster the inside of the main house.

Furnishings of Poplar Forest were in general simple Windsor chairs, a few mahogany tables and bookcases. In this home Jefferson collected his hundred book petit-format library being the smallest printed size of books in English, Italian, French, Greek and Latin, all to be used as a quick reference library. The Poplar Forest dumbwaiters unlike Monticello were simply multishelved tables carried by the servants and set in the dining room minimizing traffic in the room during meals. Poplar Forest also was home for several Campeachy chairs. These were lounging or siesta chairs, the design of which came from Mexico and were copied at Monticello. Jefferson used them in both of his houses.

Now with the house finished Jefferson traveled back and forth three to four times per year enjoying the quiet he found at Poplar Forest. He often was accompanied by two of his eldest daughter's teenage children, Ellen and Cornelia Randolph. Jefferson enjoyed their company at meals and for walks or rides. Much of the day was devoted to individual projects of study. The big meal would be in the afternoon followed by a rest, then walking on the terrace before an evening snack and bed time. There was some visiting a few neighbors but social interaction was minimal. The granddaughters loved the chance to visit with their famous grandfather. When they were all at Monticello, Jefferson was busy with all his guests and did not have enough time for them. Interestingly his surviving daughter and his two grandsons were rare visitors to Poplar Forest even though Jefferson intended eventually to give the property to Francis Eppes, his grandson and the only child of Maria, his younger daughter.

In 1817 the retired president started upon his last major intellectual and architectural project, that of founding and designing the University of Virginia. The pillared porticoes of the student and faculty houses facing the lawn are larger derivatives of the porticoes of Poplar Forest and many of the workmen who built Poplar Forest later worked to build the University of Virginia.

In 1819 a summer hail storm broke all the glass on the north side and roof of the Poplar Forest house. Jefferson used rebuilding of the dining room skylight as a chance to rebuild its surrounding roof with a complex ridge and gutter design he said which "if treated with pitch should last longer than sheet iron". Jefferson liked the plan and urged that the dormitories at the University be built similarly. Unfortunately Poplar Forest always leaked to a lesser or greater degree, similar to Le Corbusier's and Frank Lloyd Wright's houses many years later.

Hemings was put to work replacing the balustrade around the roof and making shutters for all but the portico and veranda windows to protect them from future hail storms. It was never said who was to go out in golf ball-sized hail stones to shut these shutters. The house continued to be used as a retreat. Jefferson did contract with the sculptor William Coffee to produce, near the ceiling, entablatures for the the dining room and parlor. These were made of plaster and put up just before Jefferson gave the use of Poplar Forest to Francis Eppes after his marriage to Elizabeth Randolph in 1823. Jefferson could not give him ownership of Poplar Forest because the property had been mortgaged to help cover Jefferson's personal debts. Jefferson was to live for only a few more years and did not again visit Poplar Forest. He did continue to send Hemings to fix leaks in the roof.

Thomas Jefferson died in considerable debt on July 4th, 1826, the same day and at almost the same hour as John Adams in Massachusetts. Most of his property including Monticello had to be sold to repay those debts but Poplar Forest was inherited by the grandson. Eppes did not have the ability to make the plantation pay so by December 1828 he had sold Poplar Forest to William Cobbs and his wife Marian. Their only daughter married Edward Hutter, a Navy officer from Pennsylvania in 1849, who, when he retired from the Navy, became the farmer of Poplar Forest.

In 1848 sparks from a chimney caught the roof on fire and the house burnt down with the brick walls, chimneys and columns being the only remaining elements. The Cobbs and Hutters immediately started rebuilding. In this process they changed several of the features of this house. They bricked up several of the side windows but the greatest change was to rebuild the roof at a lower level and as an ordinary faceted solid roof with four dormers, and no balustrades or skylight. They added a right angle staircase in the corner of the dining room opposite the fireplace. Bricks from the already torn down storeroom and kitchen to the east of the house were used to brick up the closed windows. The Hutter family lived in and later used Poplar Forest as a summer house for 115 years until 1943 when they sold it to James and Sarah Watts.

The Watts made considerable changes to the house adding interior bathrooms and enlarging basement rooms to make a kitchen and a dining room. They left the roof unchanged and turned the smokehouse and cook's room into a guest house. Both the Hutters and the Wattses were willing to show Poplar Forest to interested visitors.

In 1973 a North Carolina physician and Jefferson admirer bought Poplar Forest and 50 acres for six hundred thousand dollars and then sold it to the nonprofit Corporation for Jefferson's Poplar Forest in 1983. Since then 364 more acres have been purchased to increase the immediate property to about 400 acres, approximately one tenth of what Jefferson owned but Lynchberg suburbs were fast approaching and occupying the original acreage. Now the house is being restored to what it was in Jefferson's time and it is open to the public for viewing between April and November, if you are in Virginia looking for something special to see.

We remember Thomas Jefferson as a thinking man with high goals of how a government should work, and at the same time we realize how much he visualized with his well-educated mind. It is wonderful to see how having a villa retreat with a satisfying design that fits into its environment helps a thoughtful man find relaxation and a haven. As much as we like to credit others as well as Jefferson for how our country was formed, one has to admit that he was alone among the Founding Fathers in having broader interests and capabilities with his architectural design skills. Many people admire those skills at Monticello and now we can do so at the restored Poplar Forest.

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