Poplar Forest Newsletter, Spring 2006

Two hundred years ago this year…


“I find by a letter from Chisolm that I shall have to proceed to Bedford almost without stopping in Albemarle. I shall probably be kept there a week or 10 days laying the foundation of the house, which he is not equal to himself, so that it will be near the middle of August before I shall be fixed at Monticello.”

June, 1806. The Treaty with Tripoli had been signed. Lewis and Clark were trekking back from the Pacific. Resolution with Spain was needed over control of Florida. However, that challenge was paling in contrast to trying to protect neutral American ships and sailors-- as hostilities between Great Britain and Napoleon took the form of disrupting each other’s commerce to deprive each other of the means of war. And there was rumor of conspiracy simmering in the western reaches of the country, implicating Jefferson’s first-term Vice President, Aaron Burr. 

Amidst the challenges beleaguering him during his second term, in moments of “time off” at the White House the President found distraction in directing the start of his new building project— a personal retreat. Before the foundation had even been laid, in spring 1806 his mind had turned readily to the project as he wrote a letter acknowledging a gift, a bust of the Emperor Alexander, which he announced “will constitute one of the most valued ornaments of the retreat I am preparing for myself.” For Jefferson the moments he could devote to his personal project in 1806 were spent at his desk writing letters of instruction to his master builder. However, a critical juncture in the first months of the new project necessitated a rare indulgence in onsite supervision. 

When Jefferson departed Washington on July 21st he did stop first at Monticello but “set out for Bedford” on August 17,th accompanied by his 14-year-old grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph. They reached the Poplar Forest plantation August 19th. 

It had been nine months since Jefferson had dispatched his master builder, brick layer Hugh Chisolm, to Bedford at $20 per month to begin the new project. “During that time,” Architectural Restoration Director Travis McDonald notes, “Chisolm and his workers would necessarily have been digging up clay for brick-making. The clay would have needed weathering over the winter, with a few turnings. In early spring they would have started making bricks.” (The brickmaking location has been tentatively identified, near the creek behind the building site.) By June Chisolm was starting the foundation. 

The letter Jefferson had received at the White House-- advising that Chisolm had encountered a problem sufficient to warrant Jefferson’s presence— has not been found. The assumption that Chisolm may have needed help laying out the octagonal form is based on what archaeologists uncovered before restoration began: in the lowest layers of the foundation on the west side of the house a shift of 2.5 degrees was made in the layout of the foundation bricks upon which the walls were then built. 

Historian S. Allen Chambers has observed that “as Jefferson’s own drawings of octagons indicate, determining the proper angles and wall lengths of a regular octagon was a sophisticated geometric exercise, dependant on arcs, radii, and quadrants. Perhaps Chisolm could have laid out a small-scale octagon on paper, but enlarging it some fifty feet in diameter, and laying it out on a hillside in Bedford County may well have been beyond his ken.” 

The building site Jefferson had chosen involved setting the house partly into sloping ground, so Chisolm’s site preparation included digging to create a level base. As the crew removed that soil they began fulfilling another objective in Jefferson’s vision—creating a mound on the west side of the house…the first step in re-shaping the land to sculpt the retreat. 

The location where Chisolm and his crew were working was an abandoned field between two branches of Tomahawk Creek. Nearby stood a log tobacco barn (later used for storage during the construction) and a grouping of poplar trees. Archaeology has revealed that a few hundred feet away was a slave quarter of three or more houses— part of a community of approximately 61 enslaved people who were living on the property in 1806. Most of the residents were focused as usual on trying to produce a tobacco crop, despite a severe shortage of rain so far that summer. Jefferson had observed just before setting out for Poplar Forest that “the effects of drought are beyond anything known here since 1755.” 

Jefferson and his grandson stayed at Poplar Forest six days, presumably lodging at the overseer’s house. He was so focused on his building project and the crop that he subsequently wrote to a friend, “I was so much engaged while at Poplar Forest that it was not in my power to answer your letter…” For the next twelve months, he would have to indulge in his new project entirely from his desk at the White House.