Monticello - Slave Quarters On Mulberry Row

Slave Quarters On Mulberry Row

Jefferson located one set of his slaves' quarters on Mulberry Row, a one-thousand foot road of slave, service, and industrial structures. Mulberry Row was situated three-hundred feet (100 m) south of Monticello, with the slave quarters facing the Jefferson mansion. These slave cabins were occupied by the slaves who worked in the mansion or in Jefferson's manufacturing ventures, and not by those who labored in the fields.

Archaeology of the site shows that the rooms of the slave cabins were much larger in the 1770s than in the 1790s. Researchers disagree as to whether this indicates that more slaves were crowded into a smaller spaces, or that fewer people lived in the smaller spaces. Earlier slave houses had a two-room plan, one family per room, with a single, shared doorway to the outside. But from the 1790s on, all rooms/families had independent doorways. Most of the cabins are free-standing, single-room structures.

By the time of Jefferson's death, some slave families had labored and lived for four generations at Monticello. Six families and their descendants are featured in the exhibit, Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello: Paradox of Liberty (January to October 2012) at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, which also examines Jefferson as slaveholder. Developed as a collaboration between the National Museum of African American History and Culture and Monticello, it is the first exhibit on the national mall to address these issues.

In February 2012, Monticello opened a new outdoor exhibit on its grounds: Landscape of Slavery: Mulberry Row at Monticello, to convey more about the lives of the hundreds of slaves who lived and worked at the plantation.