The thunderstorm that shook the mountain during the telling of Peter Fossett's story passed. We tourists were deposited back into the present, with shafts of sunlight illuminating a peaceful scene--a broad pathway stretching into the distance, disappearing over the curve of the hillside. Jefferson named it Mulberry Row for the fast-growing shade trees he planted here in the 1790s. One thousand yards long, it was the main street of the African-American hamlet atop Monticello Mountain. The plantation was a small town in everything but name, not just because of its size, but in its complexity. Skilled artisans and house slaves occupied cabins on Mulberry Row alongside hired white workers; a few slaves lived in rooms in the mansion's south dependency wing; some slept where they worked. Most of Monticello's slaves lived in clusters of cabins scattered down the mountain and on outlying farms. In his lifetime Jefferson owned more than 600 slaves. At any one time about 100 slaves lived on the mountain; the highest slave population, in 1817, was 140.1

The labyrinths of Monticello mirror the ambiguities of its maker. As you approach the house, you are taken in by one of Jefferson's cleverest tricks: through the artful arrangement of windows he achieved the illusion of having his three-story building appear to have only one floor. He had to have a house like the ones he'd seen in Paris when he was the U.S. minister there. "All the new and good houses are of a single story," Jefferson said, in the tone of someone who has discovered a new law of physics.

So in the 1790s he tore apart his first house--eight rooms, two floors--and began work on a twenty-one-room mansion, ingeniously concealing its bulk. Its innovations included skylights, indoor privies, and a system of drainpipes and cisterns to capture rainwater. He brainstormed on novel solutions for ventilating smells and smoke, such as tunnels to carry away the odor of the privies and an underground piping system to direct the smoke of cooking fires away from the house. He built the privy tunnels, through which a slave had to crawl once a month, for a dollar, to clean them; he dropped the idea of the underground pipes, considered smokestacks in the shape of obelisks, and finally settled on just having chimneys.2

One feature that Monticello does not have is a grand staircase, usually the centerpiece of a Virginia squire's entrance hall. A waste of space, Jefferson thought, and in any event he didn't need one, because he rarely went upstairs. He had everything he needed in his private, L-shaped suite of rooms on the main floor--the bedroom, the study or "cabinet," the book room, and the greenhouse, with its access to a private terrace and the lawns. A visitor called this spacious domain Jefferson's "sanctum sanctorum." His extended family--beloved daughter, impecunious son-in-law, widowed sister, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews--packed themselves into the second and third floors, reached by an extremely narrow, steep, and winding staircase--a treacherous ascent for anyone and doubly dangerous for someone carrying a load or a squirming infant. Jeff Randolph recalled the cramped quarters allotted him as a child: "I slept a whole winter in an outer closet."3 The granddaughters, desperate for private space where they could read and write, improvised their own sitting room out of an architectural gap over a portico, contending with wasps for control of the room.4

Jefferson grasped the ways geometry talks to the eye and mind, and in his hands that arid specialty yielded visual music. He imparted an uncanny sense of motion to the inanimate mass of bricks, glass, and wood, playing variations on geometrical themes. The facades of Monticello and many of its rooms have no real corners, which puts the eye, expecting right angles, off-balance. (His design for his country retreat, Poplar Forest, which he started in 1806, called for a pure octagon containing a cube.) Today we are accustomed to skylights, but in his time people did not expect to stand indoors in gentle sunlight coming from above, banishing the expected shadows and making others.

So innovative and eccentric in its irregularities and geometric illusions, Monticello not only baffled but irritated people of Jefferson's time, who expected something more conventionally pompous. "This incomprehensible pile," grumbled one visitor, calling the house "a monument of ingenious extravagance...without unity or uniformity." Another visitor, granted a rare tour of Jefferson's private suite of rooms by the master himself, pronounced herself "much disappointed in its appearance, and I do not think with its numerous divisions and arches it is as impressive as one large room would have been." Having heard the murmurings, Jefferson had to acknowledge that his "essay in architecture" was derided as being "among the curiosities of the neighborhood."5

Then as now, people were charmed by gadgets, and Monticello was full of them. "Everything has a whimsical and droll appearance," said one guest.6 One enters the parlor through an automatic double door in which both doors open or close when just one is pushed, being linked by an unseen chain under the floor. A visitor to his sanctum sanctorum would have found telescopes, a microscope, thermometers, surveying equipment, and an astronomical clock for predicting eclipses. "His mind designs more than the day can fulfill," a visitor remarked. Laid up one day with rheumatism, Jefferson passed the hours "calculating the hour lines of a...dial for the latitude of this place."7 To satisfy an omnivorous mental appetite, he designed an ingenious revolving book holder that accommodated five open volumes at a time. Reclining on a chaise, he composed his voluminous correspondence at a polygraph, a two-pen, two-sheet proto-copying machine that produced a duplicate of a letter as it was written. Even his bed is an item of interest. He placed it in an alcove with open sides--on one side lay his dressing room, on the other his study--but the reason for the open alcove arrangement was not to provide convenient access to one room or the other from the bed but to create a "breezeway" through which the cool night air would flow with increased speed. It is often said that he invented the polygraph, which he did not, and to this day the rumor persists that his bed could be raised on ropes into a hidden compartment in the ceiling--a false story that expresses the abiding belief that Jefferson practiced all manner of disappearing tricks.

Indeed, a great deal went on here out of sight. In designing the mansion, Jefferson followed a precept laid down two centuries earlier by Palladio: "We must contrive a building in such a manner that the finest and most noble parts of it be the most exposed to public view, and the less agreeable disposed in byplaces, and removed from sight as much as possible."8

The mansion sits atop a long tunnel through which slaves, unseen, hurried back and forth carrying platters of food, fresh tableware, ice, beer, wine, and linens while above them twenty, thirty, or forty guests sat listening to Jefferson's dinner-table conversation. At one end of the tunnel lay the icehouse, at the other the kitchen, a hive of ceaseless activity where the enslaved cooks and their helpers produced one course after another.

During dinner Jefferson would open a panel in the side of the fireplace, insert an empty wine bottle, and seconds later pull out a full bottle. We can imagine that he would delay explaining how this magic took place until an astonished guest put the question to him. The panel concealed a narrow dumbwaiter that descended to the basement. When Jefferson put an empty bottle in the compartment, a slave waiting in the basement pulled the dumbwaiter down, removed the empty, inserted a fresh bottle, and sent it up to the master in a matter of seconds. Similarly, platters of hot food magically appeared on a revolving door fitted with shelves, and the used plates disappeared from sight on the same contrivance. Guests could not see or hear any of the activity, nor the links between the visible world and the invisible that magically produced Jefferson's abundance.

Looming above Mulberry Row was a long terrace where Jefferson appeared every day at first light, walking alone with his thoughts. A slave looking up from Mulberry Row would see a very imposing figure outlined against the magnificent architectural features of his mansion. Jefferson was a tall man, over six feet two inches, well muscled, and "straight as a gun barrel," his overseer Edmund Bacon said; "he had an iron constitution and was very strong."9 One of his slaves, the blacksmith Isaac Granger, remembered his master as "a tall, strait-bodied man as ever you see, right square-shouldered...a straight-up man, long face, high nose."10 Jefferson owned a spring-driven strength tester called a dynamometer that he imported from France to gauge the force needed to pull a new plow he was designing. He and his neighbors decided to test their own muscles on this proto-Nautilus machine. His son-in-law Colonel Thomas Mann Randolph could out-pull all contestants, but Jefferson beat him.11

From his terrace Jefferson looked out upon an industrious, well-organized enterprise of black coopers, smiths, nail makers, a brewer, cooks professionally trained in French cuisine, a glazier, painters, millers, and weavers. Black managers, slaves themselves, oversaw other slaves. A team of highly skilled artisans constructed Jefferson's coach. The household staff ran what was essentially a midsized hotel, where some sixteen slaves waited upon the needs of a daily horde of guests.

Below the mansion there stood John Hemmings's* cabinetmaking shop, called the joinery; a dairy; a stable; a small textile factory; and a vast garden carved from the mountainside--the cluster of industries Jefferson launched to supply his plantation and bring in cash. "To be independent for the comforts of life," Jefferson said, "we must fabricate them ourselves." He was speaking of America's need to develop manufac...