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Notes and Documents
The Material World of the Jeffersons at Shadwell
Susan Kern
| SCHOLARS who study Thomas Jefferson have had a difficult time defining his origins in the context of late-colonial Virginia culture. On no topic is Jefferson scholarship more mired in previous generations of interpretation than that of Shadwell, his birthplace, in what is now Albemarle County.1 The popular mythology of Thomas Jefferson contends that Peter Jefferson was a backwoodsman, a native of the frontier, and that Jane Randolph Jefferson brought her gentry standards to the household, though her influence was not strong. The Jeffersons were a successful planter family, yet, the story goes, the young Thomas left his Shadwell and Tuckahoe homes and his boyhood schoolmasters, and went to the metropolis where he learned his manners and tastes for finer things, first in Williamsburg, then Philadelphia, Paris, and London. |
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Contrasting popular perception, most scholars acknowledge that Peter Jefferson had nearly the status his wife had; he was, after all, a county surveyor, a county justice, a burgess, and an acquaintance of many important players in midcentury Virginia. Yet historians still embrace a story that Thomas Jefferson necessarily moved between dramatically different worlds when he moved from Shadwell to the best tables in Williamsburg and to the refined world that he ultimately created at Monticello.2 The material world of Shadwell shows, however, that young Thomas and his siblings did not have to seek refinement elsewhere: they grew up with it and carried it with them. Shadwell was full of the proper tools for entertaining and for teaching children manners: the objects there and the behaviors they imply reveal who the Jeffersons were and what they expected from their world. Their expectations, moreover, were not dictated by their location, for Albemarle indeed was still a frontier in many ways.3 Instead, the Jeffersons acquired the consumer goods and the manners that allowed participation in the colonial gentry world wherever they could find—or make—it. The material world of the Jeffersons at Shadwell illustrates the pervasive reach of the gentry and how their world of goods extended their political and social dominance across Virginia. |
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In 1943 architectural historian Fiske Kimball excavated portions of Shadwell and his assessment still reverberates through Jefferson historiography. Kimball uncovered the cellar to the Jeffersons' house, yet he could not understand the archaeological evidence because it did not fit what he wanted to find, namely, a formal "five-part Palladian plan" (Figure I). Kimball wanted to find a "mansion" to dispute the idea among some scholars that Thomas Jefferson rose from yeoman origins.4 Ironically, subsequent research at Shadwell, backed by a generation of social history and archaeology of the common man, began work looking for the yeoman model—a frontier cabin, perhaps—and found, instead, Peter Jefferson's gentry house. The work of archaeologists and architectural and social historians has enabled a better understanding of just how most of the gentry, and the larger body of folk who were not gentry, lived. Gentry houses were alike, not because of appearance, but because of function: how people arranged activities within their living spaces and what those activities were. In the mid-eighteenth century, many very prosperous people lived in relatively small houses made of wood with wooden chimneys, even as they added specialized spaces and new furnishings for entertaining and created private rooms for family in their homes. Scholarship has put these houses and their families in context by looking at buildings and furnishings as records not simply of design details but as artifacts that can show how people thought of themselves and how they related to other members of their households and communities.5 |
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