What I learned from the Communist Party

What I learned from the Communist Party which ruled my country with an iron fist and a heavy boot on our necks and thin, hungry bodies, can fill a lifetime of horror stories. Twenty years living under such depressing ideological, mental, and physical prison surrounded by barbed wire and heavily armed and guarded borders is enough to fill endless books.

But will Americans listen or read about our collective and individual experiences? Apparently not, as they are marching full-steam ahead into communism and, by the time they wake-up from their ignorant stupor, it will be too late – there will be nobody left to caution them and they themselves will not remember what it was like to live free and make personal choices in life without government interference and forced mandates. So they will comply out of fear and cowardice.

The U.S. Constitution is already just a museum piece that the government is ignoring openly and deriding on a daily basis in their kangaroo courts. Law and order only exists for the benefit of Congress and the corporate oligarchy in control of 330 plus million people. Medical tyranny walks in lock step with government tyranny at all levels.

What did I learn from the Communist Party?

If I wanted to eat, I had to keep my mouth shut and get up early every day to stand in endless lines in order to buy enough food for the day if I was lucky and had enough coupons left on the rationing card.

If I wanted to enter a church, I had to wait until someone got married, got baptized, or died. Church was another arm of the Communist Party’s indoctrination machine.

If I wanted my parents to remain free and not be disappeared, I had to keep my mouth shut around everybody, including the closest relatives who could turn us in for a loaf of bread.

If I wanted to go on vacation, I was not allowed to because my parents were too poor to afford a train ticket or a hotel. They were receiving the Communist Party-decided equity pay young Americans and Democrat Socialists are clamoring for and demanding in this country.

If I wanted to go to summer camp, I had to join the youth communist brigades first and be subjected to more indoctrination before I was deemed re-educated in the communist ideological “think” and “speak.” But my parents had to be Communist Party members as well.

The Communist Party membership had to have the right pedigree – the more uneducated and stupid, the better. They could be brainwashed easier and bought off with an extra loaf of bread or a pound of meat weekly. And the neo-communists of today are still buying off the stupid and the useful idiots. There is never a shortage of them.

If I wanted to go to the movies, it had to be in an approved group of other students and the tickets were sold as a group ahead of time. Only party members could individually go to the opera, ballet, or theater. Their tickets were practically free.

I learned at an early age that individuality, creativity, speaking out, asking questions, and free thinking were unapproved and dangerous.

If I wanted to go inside a restaurant or hotel in my hometown, I was told no. I could only watch the sumptuous and luxurious inside from the street through the well-lit windows. It was dark at home as electricity was cut off and turned on only a few hours a day in order to allow us to do housework and school homework.  

Cooking was done with a gas stove and even that was cut off every day. Bathing was once a week with hot water that only came on for two hours. We had to schedule baths or showers around that time.

If I was cold, I had to wear many layers of clothes as heat was a rare commodity in our homes. The higher up you lived in the concrete and tiny high-rise apartments, the less steam circulated through the heater coils.

I learned to disregard the propaganda lies of equity, equality, and abundance we were fed in class by day-dreaming and imagining that I was traveling to and living in a beautiful country with plenty of food, no heavy armed police everywhere, beautiful colored clothes, plenty of doctors, medicine, clean hospitals without rust and blood oozing from the walls and dirty floors, fully stocked stores, and no bread lines. I was smart enough to see the bleak reality outside, totally opposite from the communist dogma fed to us by elites who lived in comfort and confiscated wealth from the masses.

I learned to cherish loneliness and nature in my grandparents’ village. The simple and hard life in the country was so much more exciting than the urban imprisonment and desolate life.

I learned to seek refuge in books from the local library. So many good leather-bound tomes had escaped the strict censorship of the Communist Party indoctrinating goons who never read anything except the communist ideology pamphlets and Karl Marx’s dangerous ideas.

I learned to enjoy small things in life and to cherish immediate family – we never knew when we would see them for the last time before they were disappeared for their thoughts of freedom and for their dissenting opinions.

I learned that aunts, uncles, and friends who worked hard and saved and acquired too much property beyond what the Communist Party deemed necessary, were sent to hard labor camps. Some survived, some did not. They built the roads, the bridges, and other public works while in captivity, existing on meager rations each day. If they survived their sentence, they emerged like walking skeletons, their physical health and minds scarred for life.

I learned that one childhood friend’s father was a communist apparatchik which explained why they always had food, her mom always cooked desserts, and they wore nice clothes, not the faded and old ones we wore. Their daughter threw away all the communist propaganda in her father’s possession when he passed away. She is definitely anti-communist now but it is a bittersweet “conversion” as the world is turning into a globalist tyranny of the communist oligarchical elites.

I learned so much from my experience and life under the Communist Party boot that I am devastated at the communist turn my adopted country is taking now and so rapidly. The land of the free because of the brave is fast becoming a communist tyranny of the government, the corporate oligarchy supporting it, and the medical professionals who swore to do no harm and are doing harm daily with no remorse.

And the people comply silently.

 

 

 

Valuable Lessons at the National Museum of American History

I am always amazed how much I can learn from a museum trip if I really pay attention. The throngs of young Americans within are too hurried, carefully herded, and happy-to-be-out-of-school noisy to really learn from the exhibits. There is certainly no time to compare the items on display and the museum’s stories behind them to the “facts” taught in school in American History classes.

The National Museum of American History, located in the Kenneth E. Behring Center, is “devoted to the scientific, cultural, social, technological, and political development of the United States.” The 3 million artifacts of American history and culture occupy floors which house the famous Star-Spangled Banner, the flag that inspired our national anthem, Washington’s uniform, Thomas Jefferson’s lap desk, and other war, political, and cultural memorabilia.

http://americanhistory.si.edu/

I found my 1950 teal stove and oven in the museum. My kids always told me how outdated my kitchen was but I loved this stove that had cooked meals for 55 years for two families and was still operational when I replaced it in 2008 with a modern version. The European in me did not want to discard something that was built to last, all chrome and stainless steel.

Our love affair with travel and on the go eating and drinking was expressed in the vast collection of disposable containers and lids, “lids on the go.”

My first typewriters on which I learned dactylography were in the museum – the Remington manual and the IBM Selectric. I really thought I had arrived when our Dean bought several IBM Selectric typewriters with the approval of the communist party, and we were allowed to learn how to use them in a lab in my first year of college.

I found Grandma’s beautiful turn of the century pedal operated Singer sewing machine. She has created and sewn, without the benefit of a pattern, many wedding gowns, dresses, and suits on this machine – she was the village seamstress, a highly sought-after profession.

Julia Child’s kitchen was on full display with all the utensils, countertops, pots and pans, and dishes that the famous chef had used during her lifetime of television cooking, teaching generations of American women the fine art of French cuisine.

Few knew that Julia Child was also an American spy, hired in the summer of 1942 at OSS, the intelligence agency created by President Franklin Roosevelt as the first centralized U.S. intelligence operation. After initial clerical work, Julia worked directly for OSS Director William Donovan. It was a time when we truly spied on enemies like the Nazis and the communists, not patriotic Americans.

The records of 24,000 former OSS employees had been declassified including Julia Child, John Hemingway, son of Ernest Hemingway, Kermit Roosevelt, son of President Theodore Roosevelt, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, major league catcher Moe Berg, actor Sterling Hayden, and Miles Copeland, father of Stewart Copeland, drummer for the band The Police. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26186498/ns/us_news-security/t/julia-child-cooked-double-life-spy/

The main entrance of the museum displayed temporarily a beautiful red and blue Conestoga Wagon, a white tarp-covered wagon that helped settlers survive by carrying goods over the Allegheny Mountains to the western frontier and then return to Philadelphia and Baltimore laden with agricultural products. These wagons were truly the “commercial life blood of the nation” until the 1850s.

A section of the museum was dedicated to gowns worn by various First Ladies. The piece de resistance was in the center - a very expensive and opulent inaugural ball gown worn by the current First Lady.

Taxidermed heroes on display included the decorated Stubby the dog who sniffed out mustard gas during WWI, Cher Ami, a carrier pigeon who flew missions and was wounded in WWI, and Winchester, General Philip Sheridan’s horse during the Civil War. General Sheridan had the horse stuffed and mounted when he died in 1878. Rienzi carried General Sheridan from Winchester, Virginia, to the battlefield of Cedar Creek. The General awakened his troops to repel a Confederate attack. Rienzi was renamed Winchester in memory of this victorious battle.

I was surprised to find that illegal voting and Reconquista were promoted back in the early 1970. A poster in Spanish said, “SIGAMOS LA CAUSA! Registrese Para Votar,” “FOLLOW THE CAUSE! Register to Vote.” In the middle of the poster, in smaller letters, the very racist phrase appears, “Viva la Raza,” “Long Live the Race.”

Illegal aliens want to break our voting laws by screaming discrimination and racism yet Mexico requires a voter ID card to show proof of citizenship in order to be allowed to vote. Democrats support La Raza’s effort since most illegals vote Democrat, strong believers in big government as a source of success and wellbeing.

Even the very liberal European Union requires proof of citizenship for voting. Yet our Supreme Court has struck down in a 7-2 decision the Arizona law that required proof of citizenship to vote. The federal government is no longer interested in enforcing immigration laws or checking if voters are American citizens. The traditional separation of powers is gone; everything is rubber-stamped according to the decisions of the federal bureaucratic elite in power.

An interesting document dated March 1, 1929, The Ohio Schoolmasters Club, quoted a British observer of Education in the U.S., “The American Schoolmaster will soon be as extinct as the American Bison.” This statement did not miss its mark by much since education is run now by the progressive Department of Education; the schoolmaster is just a head and the mastery involves the progressive platform.

The percentage of male teachers in the U.S. of that time showed an interesting down-spiraling trend - perhaps men were busy fighting wars.

1880 …. 43%
1890 …. 35%
1900 …. 30%
1910 …. 21%
1920 …. 14%
1921 …. 11%
1930 …. ??

ABC News reported in 2008 that the number of male teachers “keeps shrinking, citing reasons such as parent bias, fear of abuse allegations, and low pay. http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Parenting/story?id=6070282&page=1#.UcML8YzD_mI

The current female-dominated trend in the teaching profession explains the obvious; most of the socialist indoctrination that occurs in public schools has been and is done by female teachers and by progressives who write textbooks that alter historical fact, promoting their version of revisionist history.

The most favorite section of the museum with male visitors was “The Price of Freedom – Americans at War.” World War II massive war materiel overwhelmed the Axis enemies, and it would certainly have made the industrial military complex proud today. But the war was a just one then, and America, with the help of its allies, restored freedom to the entire European continent.

-         324,000 aircraft

-         88,000 tanks

-         8,800 warships

-         5,600 merchant ships

-         224,000 pieces of artillery

-         2,382,000 trucks

-         79,000 landing craft

-         2,600,000 machine guns

-         15,000,000 guns

-         20,800,000 helmets

-         41,000,000,000 rounds of ammunition (Numbers from the 1995 Oxford Companion to World War II and The 1993 World War II Databook)

From the Cold War section of the museum, a chunk of the Berlin Wall, the Wall of Shame, bears witness to the evil tyranny of communism. This wall was built in 1961 to separate the Communist section of East Berlin from the free West Berlin section. For ninety-six miles within the city, “concrete slabs, wire-mesh fences, barbed wire, trenches, dog runs, watchtowers, and searchlights” separated brutal oppression from freedom.

On November 9, 1989, eager German family members who wanted to be reunited with their loved ones, climbed the wall and started to chisel and hammer chunks out of the wall. It was so strongly built, only bulldozers could take it down, a symbol of the heavily entrenched and cemented communism.

President Reagan’s words in 1987 became prophetic, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” By 1991 the Soviet Union had broken up into independent nations, the “evil empire” was no more. However, the ideology of the evil empire, communism, is very much alive. With its oppressive iron curtain, it has morphed into the hearts and minds of very young Europeans yearning for the promised utopia, and the disease has spread across the ocean.

The Spotsylvania Tree Stump was a remnant of a stately oak tree shading a meadow outside Spotsylvania Court House, Virginia, and witness to a bloody battle between 1,200 Confederates of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and 5,000 Union troops from the Second Corps of the Army of the Potomac.  The peaceful meadow became known twenty-four hours later as the Bloody Angle. The same bullets that killed 2,000 combatants of this Civil War battle reduced the majestic oak to a twenty-two inch stump.

A special dark room was dedicated to a huge American flag, 30 by 34 feet, which was raised over Baltimore’s Fort McHenry on September 14, 1814 and inspired Francis Scott Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner.” 

Made of wool bunting with cotton stars  by Mary Pickersgill of Baltimore (a professional flag maker) in the summer of 1813, the famous flag has 15 stars and 15 stripes, the official U.S. flag from 1795-1818, It was originally 30 by 42 feet – one star and other pieces were cut out as “patriotic keepsakes” in the 1800s. Mary was helped by four teenagers, her daughter, two nieces, and an African American indentured servant, who stitched together the “broad stripes and bright stars.”

Our flag today is often disrespected by being sold as door mats, underwear, shoes, hats, t-shirts; worse yet, Americans and enemies alike burn our flag to show hatred and contempt for America. Soldiers who have fought to preserve our flag and freedom must be turning in their blood-soaked graves.

The song that became our national anthem in 1931 by Congressional decree was sung at all public ceremonies since Francis Scott Key wrote the words to fit the melody of “To Anacreon in Heaven,” an 18^th century British song. It raised the spirits of our nation during the War of 1812 and during the Civil War, gaining more popularity each year. Today many performers alter and dishonor the anthem in the name of misguided artistic expression.

Leaving the museum, I found at 601 Pennsylvania Avenue, a plaque which claims to be the spot where in 1814 “The Star Spangled Banner” was first sung in public.

As an economist and teacher, my favorite parts of the museum were those dedicated to technology and currency.

Various steam engines, locomotives, tractors, motorized wagons, first cars, electric cars, buses, boats, station wagons, delivery trucks, elevators, gas pumps, electric pumps, and other motorized items described our technological history in motion.

An original Pennsylvania Turnpike plaza sign described our first long distance superhighway which opened on October 1, 1940 stretching 160 miles from Carlisle to Irwin.

The 1904 Columbia Runabout was the “bestselling car in the United States in 1900 and the first to exceed 1,000 sales.” The Runabout pictured was driven by John Oscar Skinner, superintendent of the Columbia Hospital for Women in Washington, D.C. until 1932. Wealthy urbanites bought electric cars because battery maintenance was complicated, recharging a battery was not possible in the rural areas, electric rates were high, and mileage between recharges was very low.

The electric car was revived in the 1990s by the California zero-emissions initiative and specs have improved somewhat. Electricity rates are still high, electricity is still produced with coal (49%), batteries are better, mileage between recharges is still low, the 6 recharge stations at the mall in Crystal City are always empty, and very expensive models brick themselves when they run out of charge and must be re-tooled at the factory for the whopping price of $40,000.

Route 66, dubbed the “People’s Highway,” affected American lives in many ways. Route 66, commissioned in 1926, was fully paved by late 1930s. It ran from Chicago to Los Angeles. John Steinbeck called it the “Mother Road” in the Grapes of Wrath because it allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants affected by the Great Depression to travel to California seeking jobs and a better life. Route 66 gained so much fame, way beyond its utility as a trucking route. It became a road of hope and of starting over, hoping for a better, more successful life, running away from past troubles.

Americans used roads in the 1920-1940s to migrate to new places of employment, to earn a living on the road as salesmen, or by the side of the road running businesses, and to travel for pleasure, seeing the highway as a symbol of independence and freedom. The government built the highways but it was taxpayers who funded them, it was private businesses and entrepreneurs who made it possible as well by building gas stations, garages, and making tires and other car parts. 

How easy will it be to pluck Americans from their beloved roads in order to satisfy the environmentalist agenda of sustainability, giving back paved roads to wildlife habitat, and regressing life to a time when humans could only go in their immediate surrounding area?

The road toll in human life began to mount. In 1913 more than 4,000 people died in car accidents. In the 1930s 30,000 people died in car related accidents. It was assumed that people’s behavior caused accidents and a massive campaign began, driven by safety advocates involving engineering, enforcement, and education – educating drivers and pedestrians, designing safer roads, and manufacturing safer automobiles. As we are driven into smaller and smaller cars such as the Smart Car, the environmentalist EPA agenda of saving the environment from car-made pollution is definitely more important than saving human lives.

Not surprising, the museum promotes the existence of scientifically not proven man-made global warming. “Since the 1960s, smog, greenhouse gases, global warming, and strained gas supplies have prompted a new look at electric cars.” There is certainly an abundance of gas in many discovered oil-shale reserves. The problem is that the EPA and the administration refuse to give permits for new drilling and the XL pipeline to bring gas from Canada. There are too many crony-capitalists who carry gasoline by rail who stand to be hurt financially by the approval of the XL pipeline.

An array of Watt-hour meters on display from the 1890s by Thomson, Sangamo, Westinghouse, and Stanley, still operational, measured the amount of electrical energy consumed. Cheap and reliable, valued now at as little as $2, traditional meters are being  replaced by their very expensive new cousin, the Smart Meter, sold for around $150, so smart that the digital readout fries in the intense sun after three years, requiring another expensive replacement. The Environmentalist agenda requires and demands the Smart Meters and the interconnected smart grid, a sitting duck to solar flares, cyber-attacks, and spying by government, individual hackers, and companies who pay for “consumer data mining.”

The last interesting section of the National Museum of American History was the money exhibit. Kings and queens have put their images with messages of patriotism, prosperity, and power on coins and paper money. The Shilling (Mary and Phillip II of Spain, 1955), the Ruble (Catherine II, 1762), Byzantine Empire Solidus (Constantine VI and Irene, 780), England 5 pounds (Queen Victoria, 1887), Egypt 80 Drachms (Cleopatra VII, 51-30 BC) are such examples.

Colonists circulated and accepted foreign coins, some reluctantly, such as the Rosa Americana Penny from England (1723). The England Shilling (1676) and Farthing (1614-1625), Peru’s 8 Reales (1756) and 8 Escudos (1699), Brazil’s 12,800 Reis (1730), Mexico’s 2 Escudos (1714), Mexico’s 2 Reales (1621-1665), Mexico Real (1540), France 2 Louis D’or (1710) were examples of foreign coins circulated by colonists.

Because precious metals were not readily available to colonists, the first coins struck in English North America (1607-1765) used silver from the melting down of foreign coins and inscribing them NE (New England) with its minting origin in Massachusetts – the Shilling (1652), the Oak Tree Shilling (1660-1667), the Willow Tree Shilling (1653-1660), and the Pine Tree Shilling (1667-1674).

Colonists also bartered and used local money such as wampum shells, ten-penny nails, and tobacco. Different cultures and areas used strange artifacts as money. Malaysia used the Kedah “Rooster” in the18^th century. The Chinese Turkistan used Brick Tea Money in the 19^th century. Russia used Blue Glass Trade Beads in the 19^th century. Belgian Congo used Katanga Cross about 1900. Pismo Beach, California used Clamshell scrips worth a dollar in 1933. During the Great Depression in 1933, some communities only circulated the clamshell which was worth one dollar.

The gold rush of 1825-1875 in the southeast (Carolinas and Georgia), California in 1848, and across the west furnished private minters with the raw material to make the first coins. The government eventually took over. Gold coins of one, twenty, and fifty dollars appeared.

After so many robberies, killings over gold, and the shaving of coin edges for gold dust, miners realized that paper money was safer. Images of the wild-west appeared on the first paper money. Private banks printed their own money to serve the surrounding community.

The very first federal twenty-dollar coin minted in 1849, known as the double eagle, is considered to be the most historically significant. In early 1933, 400,000 double eagles were minted. When America went off the gold standard, all but twenty coins survived the ordered melting. Of the 18,000 five-dollar gold pieces produced in 1822 by the Mint, all but three were melted down.

Today’s dollar, the “world’s reserve currency” and “petrodollar,” is not backed by anything anymore, not even the full “faith and credit” in our government. The Fed keeps printing/creating $85 billion each month until such time that the Chairman of the Reserve Board decides that the unemployment rate has magically hit 6.5 percent. There is Santa Claus for the very rich and the 47 percent “poor” who pay no taxes. For the rest of us, there is the IRS Scrooge.

I can honestly say that I learned more from artifacts in one day at the National Museum of American History than I was taught an entire semester of American (revisionist) History class in college.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thomas Jefferson's Monticello

The hilltop estate of Monticello is not easy to reach. The current owners allow foot traffic but most visitors prefer buses. When clouds cover the sky, access is denied for fear of lightning strikes. The lush vegetation and old majestic trees seclude the manor, making it invisible from the bottom of the mountain.

Monticello’s storied existence was advertised in 1921 as a “dignified country home” overlooking Charlottesville, Virginia. In 1923 the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation purchased the estate from Jefferson Levy for $100,000 in cash and a note of $400,000. http://www.monticello.org/site/house-and-gardens/jefferson-monroe-levy

The winding roads and highways to Charlottesville are flanked by beautifully-manicured farms that appear to grow nothing other than luscious green grass on which riding horses graze lazily. The occasional vineyard bears witness to the rich soil soaked with the blood and sweat of thousands of Americans encamped in Virginia or crisscrossing the land during the Civil and Revolutionary Wars. Several battlefields are clearly marked but far away from the road unless a die-hard amateur historian does not mind stepping in knee-high grasses and muddy ditches.

Thomas Jefferson, the builder of Monticello, was a remarkable Renaissance man with a resume that nobody can match today. The principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), first Secretary of State (1790-1793) under President George Washington, second Governor of Virginia (1779-1781), third President of the United States (1801-1809), diplomat (U.S. Minister to France, 1785-1789), Continental Congress delegate representing Virginia, second Vice President (1797-1801) under President John Adams, Thomas Jefferson oversaw the purchase of Louisiana from France (1803) and sent the Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-1806) to explore the new west.

Although President Jefferson signed into law a bill in 1807 that prohibited the importation of slaves into the United States, he owned hundreds of slaves at Monticello, Shadwell, and Poplar Forest. None is more famous than Sally Hemmings (1773-1835) who, at the age of 14, was daughter Mary’s maid and accompanied her to Paris. Sally’s duties were to care for Jefferson’s chamber and wardrobe, his children, and to do light work such as sewing. A newspaper reported in 1802 that Jefferson had a “concubine” named Sally. Based on “documentary, scientific, statistical studies and oral history,” many historians believe that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemmings’ children, years after his wife’s death. Sally lived as a free person in Charlottesville after Jefferson’s death.

Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr. (1768-1828), married Jefferson’s daughter Martha. He loved botany and agriculture as much as his father-in-law. He helped Jefferson run the plantation business and the often-mismanaged Shadwell mill.

On the Shadwell side of the Rivanna River, Jefferson had built two mills beginning in 1796, in the transition from farming tobacco to growing wheat. The project took ten years and $20,000 for a canal, a dam, and the two mills. One ground grain for home use and the other one was rented out to millers to grind wheat for the market. The commercial mill had the most modern machines in existence at the time for automated milling. The Rivanna River traversed the plantation and transported agricultural products to market and brought other necessary goods to the plantation.

Jefferson had a life-long friend, Adrienne-Catherine de Noailles, countess of Tesse (1741-1814) and aunt to marquis de Lafayette, with whom he shared his love of botany. They exchanged letters long after he left France. Packages containing magnolias, tulip poplars, mountain laurels, red cedars, sassafras, persimmons, and dogwood were sent to her estate in France. She reciprocated with a golden-rain tree (Koelreuteria paniculata) for Monticello.

Thomas Jefferson thought agriculture to be “the most useful of the occupations of man.” He said in 1787,”Agriculture… is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals and happiness.”

Jefferson owned four farms, Shadwell, Lego, Tufton, and the Monticello home farm. Overseers supervised 30-40 enslaved men and women who lived near and worked in the fields, at first cultivating tobacco and then switching to wheat.

Tobacco was the staple of farming in the 18^th century Virginia. It began to shift to wheat towards the end of the century due to soil depletion and changes in European markets.

Wheat cultivation was more difficult than tobacco; it required crop rotation, machinery such as threshers, fertilizers, draft animals, mills, and plowing. The change did not deter Jefferson who was an innovator and enjoyed a challenge.

Thomas Jefferson was determined to have an American wine production and struggled over many years to plant and replant imported and native vines. He started two vineyards on the south-facing slope below the garden terrace in order to have a Monticello wine. In 1807 he planted 287 rooted vines of 24 of the European table grapes (Vitis vinifera). His incursion into viticulture is evidenced by his desire to have an American winemaking industry. “I am making a collection of vines for wine and for the table.” (1786)

To succeed, Jefferson brought Philip Mazzei (1730-1816), an Italian merchant and horticulturist, and laborers to Virginia in 1773 to help with the cultivation of grapes, olives, and other Mediterranean fruits. The venture failed and Mazzei returned to Europe after a stint in the Revolutionary War effort. They remained lifelong friends.

The daily fresh vegetables came not just from the Monticello’s experimental gardens. Jefferson, but especially the women in his household, his wife, daughter, and granddaughters, often paid cash to slaves for “garden produce, poultry, and eggs” raised by slaves on their own time. Monticello account books show that “Enslaved gardeners sold cucumbers, potatoes, melons, cabbages, simlins (patty-pan squash), apples, tomatoes, and salad greens.” Slaves used underground pits to store hardy produce which they later sold to the main house.

The longest overseer at Monticello was Edmund Bacon (1785-1866) who was responsible for leveling of the beautiful garden terrace, bursting with vegetables, delicate flowers, and aromatic spices. “No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.” (Thomas Jefferson, 1811)

Through his 82^nd year, Jefferson attempted to grow plants from around the world. He stayed in touch with botanists, nurserymen, and fellow gardeners, farmers in Virginia and abroad. “The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.”

Wormley Hughes (1781-1858) was the trusted gardener who planted seeds, bulbs, and trees. He cared for both the flower and vegetable gardens. Martha Jefferson Randolph freed him upon her father’s death but his wife and eight children were sold at the 1827 dispersal sale.

Even though Jefferson applied the latest knowledge and technology to all his ideas and business efforts, allowing slaves to acquire a variety of skills, to have a self-sufficient farm, the plantation was never profitable. He accumulated so much debt throughout his life that the family was forced to sell the land, the house, the household contents, and the enslaved families upon his death.

The 5,000 acres Monticello plantation, covering the big house on top of the little mountain to Mulberry Row and other outlaying farms, necessitated the labor of enslaved field workers, craftsmen, domestics, free overseers, and members of the Jefferson family who had specific daily duties.

Jefferson supplied food, clothing, blankets, and occasional cash payments to enslaved tradesmen. Enslaved people purchased other belongings from local merchants with earnings from growing and selling garden produce, craft items, cash from additional tasks, and gratuities from visitors. 

When he married Martha Wayles Skelton (1748-1782), she brought with her wealth, slaves, and possessions. She was in charge of all domestic activities at Monticello. During her marriage to Jefferson, she gave birth to six children, but only two survived to adulthood. Thomas Jefferson described their marriage as “ten years of unchequered happiness.”

One of Martha’s most valued house help was Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings (1735-1807) who came to Monticello after the death of Martha’s father, John Wayles. Wayles was thought to be the father of one of Betty’s six children. The daughter of an English sea captain and an enslaved African woman, Hemings was the head of the largest enslaved family at Monticello. Hemings’ 70 descendants lived in bondage at Monticello as servants and craftsmen.

Jefferson inherited 3,000 acres at Shadwell from his father Peter, a surveyor, county justice, and member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. Shadwell was located across the Rivanna River from Monticello, the mountain in the sky. Growing up at Shadwell afforded Thomas Jefferson an educated childhood surrounded by wealth, books, scientific and drafting instruments, time for curiosity and exploration, travel, and contact with the elite society of those times. His mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson was the daughter of one of Virginia’s most prominent families.

During his five year diplomatic mission to France (1784-1789), Jefferson paid careful attention to technology, commerce, agriculture, and the arts. “I am constantly roving about, to see what I have never seen before and shall never see again.” He would take a month long “botanizing excursion” in 1791 through New England with James Madison and other trips with his 12 year old daughter Martha to visit the northeastern communities that he would be representing in France.

Jefferson studied classical architecture for inspiration to build and remodel his Monticello home. Each room is an example of the five orders of symmetry as written by Andrea Palladio (1508-1580). Andrea Palladio published his treatise on the history of architecture, I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (The Four Books of Architecture), in 1570, with beautiful illustrations of the Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite styles, including his own versions of Italian country homes and estates. Jefferson studied them and used them as inspiration for Monticello.

“…It may be said that Mr. Jefferson is the first American who has consulted the Fine Arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather.” (Francois-Jean de Beauvoir, Marquis de Chastellux, 1782)

Jefferson rented a townhouse in Paris, the Hotel de Langeac, with a main floor for entertainment and separate private spaces for his family’s bedrooms. Infatuated with the elegance of Parisian homes, he built Monticello in that style, adding Palladio’s Corinthian order. Chastelleux noted that the ground floor at Monticello was “chiefly a large and lofty salon,” decorated entirely in the antique style.

Monticello was initially a six-room home with a parlor, dining room, and chamber on the main floor and a study and two bedrooms on the second. In 1775 Jefferson changed the plan, adding “bow” rooms to the north and south and an octagonal bay to the parlor. Ever the innovator and inventor, Jefferson designed a roof that would improve “water shedding.” Benjamin Henry, an architect, credited Jefferson with the innovation called the “zigzag” roof.

Jefferson became the architect and builder of his home. He made the drawings, the detailed list of materials, the quantities needed, and hired 69 brick makers, brick masons, carpenters, joiners, painters, blacksmiths, and other skilled craftsmen. Nine months of the year he served his country and then he tended to his labor of love, his beloved Monticello.

Many letters record the construction process entrusted to James Dinsmore, the principal joiner, an Irishman from Philadelphia whom he hired in 1798. Dinsmore taught his trade to enslaved joiner John Hemmings who created much of Monticello’s fine woodwork. Dinsmore and John Neilson (1805-1809) worked on James Madison’s Montpelier and the University of Virginia after Monticello was completed in 1809.

John Hemmings (1776-1833), the son of Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings, became such an accomplished craftsman, he replaced Dinsmore as head joiner and trained other slaves. Hemmings “could make anything that was wanted in woodwork,” fine furniture, a landau carriage, and much of the interior woodwork at Poplar Forest. John Hemmings was freed in Jefferson’s will and received all the tools of his shop but he continued to “live and work for Jefferson’s family for several more years at Monticello with his wife, Priscilla.”

Monticello was hard labor for many people, including the enslaved workers who harvested raw materials from the surrounding plantation and fashioned them into building materials. “They dug red clay for making bricks and quarried limestone to make lime for mortar and plaster. They also felled trees, oak, pine, tulip poplar, black locust, cherry, beech, and walnut, that were hewn and sawn into lumber for framing and woodwork.” The names of the workers, freed or enslaved, were found in documents, letters, and account books.

We will never know the true cost in planning, preparing, time, money, materials, hard labor, sweat and tears that built Monticello, a witness to our past. We are grateful that this important piece of history still exists today to teach valuable lessons in perseverance, dedication, love of the land, botany, agriculture, viticulture, American ingenuity and entrepreneurship, success, failure, bondage, and of human foibles.

Source: Visit to the Monticello Plantation and Museum