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The Jeffersons At Shadwell: The Social And Material World Of A Virginia Family, Susan A. Kern

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

From the 1730s through the 1770s Shadwell was home to Jane and Peter Jefferson, their eight children, over sixty slaves owned by them, and numerous hired workers. Archaeological and documentary evidence reveals much about Thomas Jefferson's boyhood home. Shadwell was a well-appointed gentry house at the center of a highly structured plantation landscape during a period of Piedmont settlement that scholars have traditionally classified as frontier. Yet the Jeffersons accommodated in their house, landscape, material goods, and behaviors the most up-to-date expectations of Virginia's elite tidewater culture. The material remnants of Shadwell raise questions about the character of this frontier …