When the University of Virginia is your alma mater, you hear a lot about its founder, Thomas Jefferson. Not just its founder, but its architect, the man who designed the classically beautiful Rotunda and the Lawn, "the Academical Village," that graduates, including me, spend a lifetime reminiscing about, this special place where they spent their college years. Mr. J. also personally designed his famous Charlottesville home, a plantation really, the one on the back of the Jefferson nickel, the "little mountain": Monticello. So unique, such "masterpieces of human creative genius" are the Academical Village and Monticello, that they have been jointly named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Not bad for a self-taught architect.
I did not set foot on the Grounds* of The University* until the day I arrived for first-year* orientation in 1974 (more common back then, to go to a college you had never seen), and although I can't remember for sure if my parents took us to Monticello during my childhood, it wasn't long after starting college that I visited there and started learning about Jefferson's innovations and inventions -- the seven-day clock in the hallway, the polygraph that allowed him to make a copy of every letter he wrote, his alcove bed, the nifty revolving bookstand. And I didn't just go there once or twice. Every time family or friends came to visit, they were eager to see Monticello as well, and I used to joke I had been there so many times I could give the tour as well as any of the guides. I do not, however, remember any mention of slavery.
[*At UVa students do not say campus or quad, they say "Grounds," because that is what Mr. Jefferson called it. And students are never referred to as freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors, but first-, second-, third-, and fourth-year, because Mr. J. felt that these four years were but the beginning of a lifetime of learning. We also like to say "The University" a lot. Yeah, I know, pretty pretentious.]
I don't know when I first heard of Poplar Forest. Located near Lynchburg, Virginia, Poplar Forest was Jefferson's country home -- again, plantation really -- used in his later years as a retreat, his pied-a-terre.
The Poplar Forest (and also the Monticello) websites cover the history of Poplar Forest quite thoroughly, but in brief, Jefferson and his wife Martha inherited the plantation upon her father's death in 1773. In the early years, Jefferson manged the plantation -- it mostly grew tobacco -- from afar, but in 1781 the Jefferson family left Monticello and stayed at Poplar Forest for two months, possibly in the overseer's cabin, to avoid capture by the British. That was thought to be Martha's only trip to the plantation, as she died later the same year. After her death, Jefferson continued in the role of absent landowner, with overseers managing the plantation, and enslaved laborers performing the work.
At some point Mr. J. decided to design a country getaway there. In 1806, during his presidency, Jefferson traveled to Poplar Forest to supervise the laying of the cornerstone for what was to become the one-story, brick, octagonal dwelling you can visit today. After he left office in 1809, although Monticello remained his primary residence, Jefferson began visiting Poplar Forest several times a year, a practice he continued until the age of 80, three years before his death in 1826. Each visit lasted between two weeks and two months, as the trip from Monticello to Poplar Forest, which takes only an hour and a half by car today, took two days by horseback and three by carriage.
As important as Poplar Forest was to Jefferson, there are reasons for its obscurity. It was sold by Jefferson's grandson Francis Eppes in 1828, only two years after Jefferson's death (Francis and his wife moved, of all places, to Tallahassee). The house burned in 1845 (thank goodness for stone foundations and a brick exterior), was substantially remodeled, and remained in private hands until 1983, when the Thomas Jefferson Foundation bought the property and undertook the daunting -- and expensive -- task of restoration. Thus, it is only in recent years that it has finally been open to visitors, and even today the restoration is still ongoing and hardly complete.
When our nephew Chris took a job in Lynchburg and moved there with his then-fiancée-now-wife Kata, it seemed like the perfect excuse to combine a visit with them and a trip to Poplar Forest. Although Dan and I actually saw Chris and Kata in Lynchburg twice en route to other places, when they had lived in Lynchburg less than a year Chris took another job and they moved again before we had a chance to execute the plan. But the seed was planted, and I was committed to seeing Poplar Forest. My husband is as much of a history geek as I am, and it took little persuading to talk him into an overnight to Lynchburg, which is, after all, not even 2 1/2 hours from our home in Durham.
Poplar Forest ended up being the last thing we did on our 30-hour excursion. During our preparatory research, Dan noticed that the last home of Patrick Henry, Red Hill, was basically on the way to Lynchburg, and we decided to make that our first stop. A lovely, peaceful, place, especially on a sunny, hot July afternoon without many tourists in evidence. "Give me liberty or give me death!" "Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings -- give us that precious jewel and you may take everything else!" The guy could really turn a phrase.
In Henry's time, we learned, Red Hill encompassed about 3,000 acres. Another plantation. Our tour guide pointed out where the slave cabins once were -- as we have learned in other places, not too near the main house in order not to disturb the pastoral view, and virtually never still standing, these humble, roughly-built cabins never intended to stand the test of time. We squinted, looking into the distance. Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings. Guiltily, the midafternoon sun blazing, we did not walk up the hill to bear witness. But at least this history is no longer ignored, invisible. Red Hill's website has a section, Slavery at Red Hill. It includes an excerpt of a letter written by Henry in 1773, where he says of the fact he is a slaveowner, owns human beings: "I will not, and cannot justify it."
The next morning, since our hotel was in downtown Lynchburg and Poplar Forest vaguely on the way back to Durham, we decided to first stop at the Lynchburg Museum, located in the old courthouse. The exhibit in the large entrance hall on the main floor is a history of Lynchburg. In a section called An Upward Struggle, I read:
State-sanctioned segregation increasingly became an issue in the 1950s. Schools were separate, parks were separate, seating in theaters was separate, and the separateness was not equal.
Near those words is a photograph of Clarence W. Seay, assured, looking ahead, a hand in the pocket of his topcoat. The caption states that he was the principal of Dunbar High School, an all-black, segregated high school, for 30 years, and that in 1970, he became the first African-American member of the Lynchburg City Council since the 1880s.
As I gazed at the photograph, I thought about how, on the way into the museum, we stopped by a statue facing the courthouse, a statue erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1890, "to commemorate the heroism of our Confederate soldiers." 1890, after Reconstruction, after the Yankees finally decamped, when blacks had the vote and even were elected to the City Council. Time to put up a statue, a statue complete with a time capsule filled with Confederate currency, photographs of local veterans, and some hair from Traveller, Robert E. Lee's horse. Time for Jim Crow. Time to wait nearly a century for the next African-American to serve on the City Council. And the Confederate Soldier still stands, on the top of Monument Terrace, in 2016.
Poplar Forest at last. Hot again. We eat our picnic lunch in pleasant solitude in the shade, looking at a grove of trees, grateful for a breeze.
The plantation was about 5,000 acres in Jefferson's day, and even with today's reduced size, is a thing of beauty, of symmetry, with the house placed in the center of a circular curtilage.
And there are still poplars on the property.
So yes, I loved the house, both back
and front.
I loved the light-filled interior (sorry, no pictures allowed), but the internet yields one of Jefferson's recliner -- a reproduction -- where he sat and contemplated the world.
Evan was a great tour guide and with only two others on our tour, we got to ask lots of questions.
But unlike my first trip to Monticello, Jefferson the slaveowner weighed deeply on my consciousness throughout our time at Poplar Forest. Again, on the tour itself, in the exhibits, on the website, in the brochure, as best as it can from the available historical evidence, this story is now being told. So we now, at last, can say their names, names inventoried and written in Mr. Jefferson's own hand: The Hubbards, Hannah and Jame and Phill and Billy. Bess's Caesar. Fanny's Rachael. Cate's Sally. Suck's Stephen. All endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Dinah. Lucinda. Armistead. John. Isaac. Briley. Prince. Melinda. Milly. Daniel. Flora. Hercules. Abby. Nace. And so many more.
