Virginia - Monticello: Mulberry Row - Textile Workshop
In 1812, Thomas Jefferson expanded and mechanized cloth manufacturing at Monticello, establishing a textile workshop in a building along Mulberry Row originally constructed as housing for free white workers. In this building, a dozen enslaved women and girls, as young as age 12, wove coarse fabric to help clothe Monticello slaves. The textile workshop featured two 18th-century inventions – the loom with a "flying shuttle" (1733) and the "spinning jenny" (1770). By 1815, Jefferson reported, "I make in my family 2000. yds of cloth a year, which I formerly bought from England, and it only employs a few women, children & invalids who could do little in the farm."
Monticello was built by Thomas Jefferson between 1769 and 1809. Situated on the summit of an 850-foot high park in the Southwest Mountains south of the Rivanna gap, Monticello, whose name derives from Italian meaning "little mountain", was originally a 5,000 acre plantation cultivated tobacco and mixed crops using the labor of enslaved African people. After Jefferson's death, his daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph sold the property to Uriah P. Levy who preserved the property and left it to his nephew Jefferson Monroe Levy, who eventually sold it in 1923 to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which operates it as a house museum and educational institution.
National Register #66000826 (1966)
VLR #002-0050
UNESCO World Heritage Site #442
AIA150 #27
Virginia - Monticello: Mulberry Row - Textile Workshop
In 1812, Thomas Jefferson expanded and mechanized cloth manufacturing at Monticello, establishing a textile workshop in a building along Mulberry Row originally constructed as housing for free white workers. In this building, a dozen enslaved women and girls, as young as age 12, wove coarse fabric to help clothe Monticello slaves. The textile workshop featured two 18th-century inventions – the loom with a "flying shuttle" (1733) and the "spinning jenny" (1770). By 1815, Jefferson reported, "I make in my family 2000. yds of cloth a year, which I formerly bought from England, and it only employs a few women, children & invalids who could do little in the farm."
Monticello was built by Thomas Jefferson between 1769 and 1809. Situated on the summit of an 850-foot high park in the Southwest Mountains south of the Rivanna gap, Monticello, whose name derives from Italian meaning "little mountain", was originally a 5,000 acre plantation cultivated tobacco and mixed crops using the labor of enslaved African people. After Jefferson's death, his daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph sold the property to Uriah P. Levy who preserved the property and left it to his nephew Jefferson Monroe Levy, who eventually sold it in 1923 to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which operates it as a house museum and educational institution.
National Register #66000826 (1966)
VLR #002-0050
UNESCO World Heritage Site #442
AIA150 #27