what you see behind me is jefferson's most intimate, perfect work of architecture. poplar forest.

that was his villa retreat that he starts building when he's president and it's not known very much because jefferson kept it a secret and then it was lived then privately until 1979. so. since 1984, it's been a house museum, a private nonprofit project, and we've been doing restoration open for the last 30 years. it's a very long, slow process because we try to do the most authentic process just like jefferson first did, it. so we are in the home stretch of restoring the main house. we have craftsmen who are making the moldings by hand and we're following jefferson's exact historical sequence, not just

the same materials and techniques, but the same historical timeline. so once jefferson started living here, it took him 14 years to finish it because it was his most perfect work, all for his own inspiration. and and yet he never invited anybody to come see his most perfect work, which tells us that it was all for himself. so this is his missing link of architecture. it's a very important work that we can call jeffersonian. if you want to put an architectural label on it. it's a melting pot. of all the ideas, he had collected throughout his lifetime and put together and this one personal work, this was a property that jefferson's wife's father owned, and jefferson and his wife inherit this in 1773. it's way out here on the

frontier in western virginia and jefferson thinks about it for a long time. and then eventually when he still in the white house, he starts construction of poplar forest, which was fortunate because he has to send detailed letters to the workers here and the workers send letters back to the white house, which makes us one of the most document it early american houses. and it's not a generic house. it's a very particular house. jefferson's letters are very detailed and explicit. it so 1809, jefferson lays the white house, he starts using poplar forest. that year. it's an unfinished shell and that doesn't matter. it's a peaceful, quiet place. so he comes here for between 1809 and 1823, up to four times

a year, usually bringing one servant or the other enslaved people who are here on the plantation to help him when he's in residence. but it's mostly jefferson trying to be by himself. if you want to imagine the historic sound of poplar forest when jefferson's here, it's the sound of his mind. he's reading, he's writing. he's thinking eventually he brings two teenage granddaughters here with him and then finally in 1823, he gives us to his grandson, francis epps, who lives here for five years. the house then went through two other families and was finally rescued in 1983 to be a museum. this was a working plantation, one of five of the jefferson owned.

originally 5000 acres, but in his lifetime, time goes down to 1000. it's a typical tobacco plant nation with up to 100 enslaved people. eventually, jefferson's trying to do wheat as a cash crop, but the challenge here out into the piedmont is you have to get your cash crops down to richmond, where you can put them on ships. so jefferson liked this site because it was so remote. it's right up against the blue ridge mountains, but it is a challenge to get your economy down to richmond. but typically, when jefferson's not here, the house is locked up. when he comes to stay anywhere between two and two weeks and two months, he is typically by himself. jefferson always needed a retreat when he's in richmond,

as governor, when he's in paris, when he is in philadelphia and new york with the government, he's always looking for and using a retreat just he needs to be by himself to do his greatest thinking and so you could say, well, you know, he's leaving public office after 40 years retiring to monticello. why does he need a retreat? well, monticello had become like a hotel. and every one ever either knew jefferson or even didn't know him, would drop in and want to be entertained. and at monticello, lo jefferson's almost a prisoner. he locks himself in his private suite. he really needs poplar forest, even in retirement, to be by himself to what we might say is the recharge his intellectual batteries. and it's also in the peace and quiet of poplar forest that he

does his last great project, the university of virginia. and even when that is under construction, he's at poplar forest, sometimes sending letters up to the workers. this is a compilation of many things that jefferson loved the most fundamental being the octagon from his college days at william and mary when he learned architecture on his own. he loves the shape of an octagon and poplar. forest becomes his ultimate octagon, the first octagon house in america. and within that octagon, it's a very geometric puzzle to to solve. and the middle of this octagon house is a 20 foot cube and then around that cube are a tag on all rooms and it really is a radically modern work of

architecture for the time, because it was for one person that used it occasionally. it didn't have to operate as a typical house. five years after jefferson started living here, he adds, a wing of what he calls service rooms. service meaning? kitchen laundry, smokehouse. these ideas of wings attached to the house. he had seen in a book from the renaissance. but he makes it his own device by inventing a a hidden roof that gives you a flat deck on top. we are almost sure he wanted balanced wings, but only the 100 foot wing on the east got built. it's the same size as the two wings he had just added to the white house, which also had service rooms, which also had a flat deck that he could stroll on and sit on. so these wings are very

jeffersonian in concept and they were important for him to engage nature by using the top while his enslaved servants used the bottom, jefferson hired his same white workers the carpenter, the bricklayer who had been working at monticello, who later went on to the university of virginia. but once the shell was finished, by 1809, all of these finished work at poplar forest, inside and out was done by john hemmings, an enslaved craftsman from on a cello, who by that time is the master craftsman at monticello. and john hemmings comes here with his nephews, is two or three nephews to do all the finished woodwork in the house and john hemmings is not only literate, he and jefferson write letters back and forth as

jefferson, for instance, is at monticello and hemings is at poplar forest. and what's interesting is they both speak in this architectural language that not too many people would have known about, especially in the slave person. and jefferson says of hemings work he's never seen better work from anyone. so architecturally, we are in the final stages of completing the interior of the house, making moldings by hand. jefferson's roman moldings. but right now we are re plastering the ceiling and then the house we did those back 2003 but we've had to redo them for a number of reasons. so today you're going to see a traditional process of lime plaster being put on ceilings using a hand, split oak lath

from england, plaster mixed with goat hair done by two english plasterers who now live in the united states. and, you know, this is a process no one has really seen for probably 100 years. and even parts of it, not since jefferson's time. so this is a very rare opportunity to see this authentic process. so what we're doing now is the f the scratch coat. all right. we've had sand and lime on hand, split out cloth. so this this material is very

hairy, like, very sticky. so we wear all the last down and get this coat on about 3/8 thickness. really force it in there. so it paints up behind a lot and hooks over. and then we're going to leave it for about four weeks to harden over a period of time. and then we'll come back and do the next k after that. okay? okay. here on a wall, exhibit, we can describe the same process that we're doing on the ceilings. so up here at the top, you see the hand split lath. this is the scratch coat that we're putting on the ceilings now. the scratch coat goes through and and bonds and hangs on to the wood. laugh. the scratch coat is actually

named for an obvious reason. so the plaster uses a piece of wood and scratches this when it's wet. the purpose of the scratches then is for the second coat, the brown coat or leveling coat to bond to this layer and the whole art of line plastering, which hasn't really been done in this country since about 1900. it is to know when this coat goes on, this coat, it's all about timing and the wetness or dryness of this coat. this has the bond to that. while it's still a little wet. and that's the art of having somebody who knows lyme plastering because whether the amount of time it takes to do this onto this varies for temperature, humidity whether

you're in the south the north. so there really is an art to the timing. and so first coat, second coat. and then lastly, the white coat is the finished coat, which is a very thin coat of lime without so much sand, which gives a very smooth, almost marble like feeling. and this is the the material that jefferson was coloring on the walls with pigmented lime washes. the reason you use pigment at lime wharf is you could put color on a fresh plaster or a wall immediately because the lime wash is the same material as the plaster and if you wanted to put oil paint on here, you might have to wait a year or two because it takes a long time for this plaster to dry out.

okay, so. yeah, so here we can see one ceiling and that is already been finished with the scratches and so this will be curing for about a month and then it will then receive the second coat. so what we're doing in the interior now, before and after this plaster process is we're putting up all the wood trim in the house that john hemmings had made originally. and what's significant about what this is right here is that this has been done by hand, not machine. so all of these same moldings, these classical roman moldings that were so important to jefferson have been made with a hand plain and in this case,

this is antique hart, poplar wood, because jefferson is surrounded by the poplar forest, a poplar tree forest which gave the house its name and was a very distinct, active part of nature that jefferson loved and so we're using jefferson era wood from one of his poplar trees using the same techniques. and this will all be painted. so we have the architraves here, we have the chair rail, we have the base is down here and up in the top here in this room, entry passage. we had the beginnings of the in tablet chairs in the house. the tablature is the large set of moldings that goes above the columns and graeco-roman architecture. we can go down now and see dave

making these moldings on the workbench and the lower floor of poplar forest. we're now in the lower level of the house and in in this restoration process, we're using the bench down here to create moldings. most of them are out of poplar wood that's actually been taken in some of the property and the tool we're using for modern day woodwork. we're kind of going back time and using various different old style tools. plains process. we have actually a newer tool, but it's made in the old way and of course it's a wood body plane with a steel cutter and which is used to hold the blade in place and this particular plane, i'll demonstrate later, it actually a profile for the doors that were

in the house. and we've also used this for some of the window panels, panels, lamps and so forth and some of the other tools to make these pieces like this where you have this is part of a cornice of the in tablature and you have a lot of kind of concave, convex areas. and so to do that, you can use a flat plane. you you have to use a plane that has either a round bottom. and i hope you can see this. but once again, it's the wood body. but you have that rounded bottom to create some of the curved out areas. and the other type would be this type where you can actually create a rounded area on the material. so what i can do is maybe do a

few passes with this plane just as a little bit of a demonstration. and so what we're trying to do here, rather than run interior, would work on machinery, which would be quick. we're using these tools and actually in this location, people can come in and see us in the process. so i'll show you a little bit how that works. so that process, just a few swipes there that you can see. basically, you're starting from one end and and passing the plane across. and eventually, if you continue to, you will have a profile on there. an important part of the history here is the the workmen that created poplar forest in the

original time period. and john hemmings is working for thomas jefferson and he's the master joiner. jefferson has a lot of confidence in his abilities and his nephews. so eston and madison would be working with them and jefferson actually purchases a full set of tools and i'm sure that john hemmings had access to use those tools and he works faithfully for jefferson for many years, working originally at monticello as an apprentice and learns the trade. and then he becomes the master craftsman for jefferson. and he works on this house. his primary responsible for the work here, all the woodwork and carpentry, a good deal of it. so. upon jefferson, his death, the

tools that hemings has used for many years working for jefferson are given to him through jefferson's will, and he's also given his freedom at that time. and so he can make a living as a free man that way. and so we're happy that we're able to share the story of the history along with the process of the restoration.

good afternoon. so we have talked quarter about conspiracy theories, u.s. history. we talked