When
a historic building gets remodeled, the process involves construction
workers, historic preservationists, architects, and archaeologists. It
was not always so. You never know what you might find, but the
professionals working on restoring Thomas Jefferson's home Monticello
had an idea of what they
might find, and they did -the room where
Sally Hemings
lived. Hemings, a slave, was the half-sister of Jefferson's wife who
became his mistress after Martha Jefferson died -and bore six children.
Hemings' windowless room was next to Jefferson's, but was converted into
a men's restroom in 1941 and now has been uncovered to reveal the
original floor, hearth, and fireplace.
“For the first
time at Monticello we have a physical space dedicated to Sally Hemings
and her life,” Mia Magruder Dammann, a spokeswoman for Monticello, told
NBCBLK. “It’s significant because it connects the entire African
American arch at Monticello.”
By the late 1960s, Magruder said,
the earlier bathrooms had become too small to accommodate Monticello’s
growing number of visitors so local restoration architect Floyd Johnson
renovated and enlarged the bathrooms in 1967.
But recently,
historians studied a description provided long ago by a grandson of
Jefferson who placed Hemings’ room in the home’s South Wing.
The
current restoration project is an attempt to bring Monticello back to
its original state when Jefferson lived there, including the relics of
his slaves that were ignored or covered up previously. Read more about
Hemings and the restoration of Monticello at NBC News.
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