The Jeffersons at Shadwell

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) was born and raised in Shadwell, the Virginia plantation home of his father, his mother, their eight children, and more than 60 slaves. When it burned in 1770, Jefferson moved to nearby buildings that soon became Monticello. Shadwell vanished from history until archeologists began digging up the site in 1943. A former archeologist for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Kern combines their findings with existing documents, letters, wills, and business records to deliver a scholarly portrait of life in the pre-revolutionary South that overturns some popular perceptions and historians' views, most particularly that Jefferson's father was a hardy frontiersman rather than a member of the gentry. According to Kern, Shadwell was equipped with all the material and cultural trappings of elite Virginia society. Kern leaves no stone unturned, and primarily academics will appreciate her lengthy enumeration of archeological remains, inventories, itineraries, and demographic statistics, but she provides an intensely fact-based account of the young Jefferson's "well-ordered, well-connected world," from the layout of his childhood dwelling and its contents to the lives, possessions, and social position of his parents, neighbors, hired hands, and slaves. Illus., map. (Sept.)