Review: Slavery at Monticello: Life and Work on Mulberry Row

Abstract

Slavery at Monticello: Life and Work on Mulberry Row http://slavery.monticello.org/mulberry-row Years ago, in the course of an obligatory visit to relatives, my family and I stopped briefly at Monticello. As an undergraduate architectural history student, I was excited about seeing this iconic site in person. We had only an hour or two to spare—perhaps that is why I have almost no memory of learning about slavery at Monticello. Today, engaged visitors can enrich their experience of the former plantation with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation's new app, Slavery at Monticello: Life and Work on Mulberry Row. The app introduces slavery at Monticello by focusing on the small group of dwellings, workshops, and sheds known as Mulberry Row. Hidden on a slope to the south of the “big house,” Mulberry Row included at least twenty structures where some of Jefferson's more than six hundred slaves lived and worked. The app is part of a groundswell of new thinking about place-based storytelling that builds on advances in digital technologies.1 At the same time, it responds to efforts in museology to attract differentiated audiences. The Slavery at Monticello app is also the culmination of a decades-long turn in the historiography of Monticello. Through painstaking attention to plantation records and by following associated leads, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation has reoriented attention away from hagiography and toward an understanding of Monticello as a working plantation.2 This work has shaped the presentation of the house museum and its programming, which includes a website that is easy to navigate yet brimming with layers of knowledge about the house, its inhabitants, and their milieu. Three themes organize the website: Jefferson, the “big house,” and slavery. The section on slavery includes three online exhibitions: one …