Poplar Forest
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Poplar Forest is a plantation and plantation house in Forest, Bedford County, Virginia. Thomas Jefferson
designed the plantation and used the property as a private retreat and a
revenue-generating plantation. Jefferson inherited the property in 1773
and began designing and working on the plantation in 1806. While
Jefferson is the most famous individual associated with the property, it
had several owners before being purchased for restoration,
preservation, and exhibition in 1984.
Poplar Forest was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1971, and is presently operated as a historic house museum by the nonprofit Corporation for Jefferson’s Poplar Forest. The Corporation is also responsible for the ongoing archaeological study and restoration work at the property.
Poplar Forest
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Poplar Forest, designed by Thomas Jefferson
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| Location | 1548 Bateman Bridge Road, Forest, Virginia[1] |
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| Nearest city | Lynchburg, Virginia |
| Coordinates | 37°20′53.736″N 79°15′53.8194″WCoordinates: 37°20′53.736″N 79°15′53.8194″W |
| Built | 1806-1826 |
| Architect | Jefferson, Thomas |
| Architectural style | Other |
| NRHP reference # | 69000223 |
| VLR # | 009-0027 |
| Significant dates | |
| Added to NRHP | November 12, 1969[3] |
| Designated NHL | November 11, 1971[4] |
| Designated VLR | May 13, 1969[2] |
Poplar Forest was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1971, and is presently operated as a historic house museum by the nonprofit Corporation for Jefferson’s Poplar Forest. The Corporation is also responsible for the ongoing archaeological study and restoration work at the property.
Contents
History
Thomas Jefferson by Thomas Sully,
1821. This portrait is considered a truthful representation of
Jefferson's appearance during the time which Poplar Forest was designed
and constructed[5]
Wayles’ daughter Martha Wayles Skelton was married to Thomas Jefferson, and the couple inherited the full 4,819 acres when Wayles died in 1773.[6] The Jeffersons did not immediately continue developing Poplar Forest, nor were they frequent visitors to the property – their focus was on developing Monticello, Thomas's political and legal career, and raising their family.[6] Martha Jefferson died in 1782, and Thomas spent time away from Virginia in public service following her death, serving as Minister to France (1785-1789), Secretary of State (1790-1793), Vice President (1797-1801), and President (1801-1809). Even in Jefferson's absence, the plantation was generating revenue from slave labor under the watch of a general steward and a team of overseers; the slave labor force at Poplar Forest produced annual tobacco and wheat crops after 1790.[6]
Jefferson conducted annual visits to Poplar Forest beginning in 1810 and ending in 1823; he designed Poplar Forest as his retreat from his larger estate at Monticello. The retreat house was completed in 1816 and his visits ranged from a few days to weeklong stays.[7][6] He frequently brought his granddaughters Ellen and Cornelia Randolph to the house after it was completed in 1816, and always traveled to Poplar Forest with a small cadre of enslaved men and women who were based at Monticello.[6] Jefferson maintained sole ownership of the property and the slaves until 1790, when he gave 1,000 acres and six slave families to his daughter Martha and her husband Thomas Mann Randolph Jr. Randolph would later divide and sell the rest of Jefferson's landholdings; he also sold many of Jefferson's slaves to repay debts.[6]
Near the end of his life, Jefferson sought to find permanent residents for the property, and his grandson Francis W. Eppes and wife Mary Elizabeth moved to Poplar Forest shortly after their 1823 marriage.[6] Jefferson died in 1826, and made his last visit to Poplar Forest in 1823.[8] The Eppeses sold Poplar Forest in November 1828 to William Cobbs; Cobbs assigned the task of managing the property to his son in law Edward Hutter in 1840 following his marriage to Cobb's daughter Emma.[6] This period from 1745-1840 in which Poplar Forest was sold many times in quick succession meant that many enslaved men, women, and children were separated from their families as the owners settled their predecessor's debts. The Cobbs and Hutter families maintained ownership of Poplar Forest into the twentieth century. The Hutter's son Christian purchased the property in the late nineteenth century and used it as a summer home and working farm into the 1940s using labor from both black and white hired farmhands and tenant farmers.[6]
Christian Hutter sold the property to James Watts’ family in 1946; the Watts family operated Poplar Forest as a dairy farm and worked with Phelps Barnum and W. Stuart Thompson to restore the house to the way it appeared during Jefferson's time.[6] They also did significant landscape development, and sold a majority of the remaining land to a developer who constructed a nine-hole golf course and a lake along the eastern and southern part of the property.[6]
Dr. James Johnson purchased the house and 50 acres of land from the Watts family in 1980; the nonprofit Corporation for Jefferson's Poplar Forest purchased the acreage and the remaining physical structures on the property in 1984.[9] The organization has worked in recent years to reacquire land within the original plantation boundaries, and as of 2008 owned 617 acres of the original property.[6]
Architectural Design
When construction began at Poplar Forest in 1806, Jefferson was still President of the United States. He supervised the construction from Washington, DC.[10] Thomas Jefferson was a self-taught architect known for his work at Monticello and the Virginia State Capitol; he frequently borrowed designs from classical sources, and was attracted to Palladio's classical architecture in Rome as well as designs from 16th century France.[10] Jefferson designed Poplar Forest as his personal retreat house, and selected the property because of its distance from his public life.[11]The octagonal house may have been the first of its kind to have been built in the United States.[12] The house at Poplar Forest is made of brick and has an octagonal floor plan; it consists of a central square space and three sides made of elongated octagon rooms. There is an entry hall on the remaining side of the house, which is two smaller rooms divided by a short entry hall. There is a skylight in the central dining room and its dimensions are 20’ x 20’ x 20’, which makes it a perfect cube.[10] Jefferson also elected to add pedimented porticoes on low arcades that were attached to both the northern and southern facades as well as the east and west stairwells.[10] Scholars agree that the retreat house at Poplar Forest is an excellent example of octagonal symmetry; Jefferson's design for the building reflects a consistent geometric approach likely made possible by his well-known proficiency in algebra, geometry, trigonometry and Newtonian calculus.[10]
Post-Jeffersonian Modifications and Preservation
By different owners, the main house underwent many alterations, and the plantation's acreage was incrementally reduced to 50 acres (20 ha) at the time of acquisition by the Corporation for Jefferson's Poplar Forest.[6] There was a fire in 1845; the Cobbs and Hutter families chose to rebuild in the Greek revival style and to add an attic story for sleeping; this modified the interior plan of the house.[6] The original walls, chimney, and columns remained after the renovation.[10]The Corporation for Jefferson's Poplar Forest is using early 19th century building materials including heavy timber fram construction, hemp sash cord, iron hardware from Colonial Williamsburg as well as 19th century building techniques in their restoration work including column rendering and burning limestone to produce traditional lime mortar and plaster.[13] The goal of the restorations is to restore Poplar Forest to Jefferson's original architectural vision.[13]
Slavery at Poplar Forest
Slaves were present on the property from the 1766 through 1865, when slavery was formally abolished in the United States.[14] Present-day knowledge of the slave populations and their contributions to Poplar Forest is based on both archaeological and archival evidence. John Wales used slave labor to originally develop roadwork on the property, and when Thomas and Martha Jefferson inherited the land that included Poplar Forest from Wales, they also inherited 135 enslaved men, women, and children as well as other tracts of land in Amherst, Cumberland, Charles City, Goochland, and Powhatan counties.[6] Because Wayles chose to split his estate among several heirs, slave families were separated in order for his heirs to pay his debts.[14]As Jefferson turned more attention to Poplar Forest, he brought slaves from Monticello, Elk Hill, Indian Camp, and Judith's Creek, thus increasing the slave population at Poplar Forest.[14] Jefferson kept consistent records of the slaves living at Poplar Forest; these records show that the slave population fluctuated between as few as 28 and as many as 95 individual slaves were working at Poplar Forest between the years 1774 and 1819.[6] As an active participant in the slave trade, Jefferson sold and purchased slaves throughout the time he owned Poplar Forest, including a sale of 40 slaves from his various properties in Bedford County, VA in the 1790s.[14] The Eppeses inherited the house, about 1,075 acres of land, and several enslaved men and women after Jefferson's death in 1826.[6] The Cobbs and Hutter families also used slave labor on the property through emancipation, and maintained some former slaves as hired workers following.[6]
Plantation and Slave Economics
Slave labor was vital to Poplar Forest's economic success. Beginning in 1790, the slaves at Poplar Forest initially grew tobacco and livestock for profit, and later began growing wheat.[6] Records from Edward Hutter's tenure at Poplar Forest show that slaves were regularly tasked with tilling fields and digging ditches in addition to their work growing and harvesting plants to be sold at market.[6] Slaves worked six days each week, and were also responsible for constructing and maintaining their housing structures. Scholars have determined that the enslaved community at Poplar Forest devised a commerce system amongst themselves; slaves were allowed a small plot of land with which to grow food and produce goods that could be traded or sold to fellow slaves as well as the owners' families and the outside market.[6] Archaeologists at Poplar Forest have uncovered clothing accessories such as buttons, glass beads, gilt chains, aiglet/lace tips, and fancy buckles that were likely used as currency amongst slaves at Poplar Forest and the surrounding plantations.[14]Documents from the 19th century show that the transition from tobacco-based to mixed-crop plantation agriculture left Poplar Forest with an abundance of laborers; William Cobbs in particular is known to have hired out slaves from the plantation to external projects. Other individual slaves (including two women named Lucy and Matilda) are known to have had access to money during this time so that they could buy items on behalf of the Cobbs/Hutter families.[6] Edward Hutter regularly leased slaves from Poplar Forest to businesses and planters in Bedford County.[6]
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