Scouts Take Trip to Monticello

Submitted by J. Marsh, T270 Historian

They explored every place they could: the house, the basement, the garden, and Mulberry Row. 

Monticello was the house of Thomas Jefferson and had one of the first air-conditioning systems in history. It is also the second version of Monticello.

After Jefferson came back from France, he wanted his house to look more like the houses he saw in France. The basement has a kitchen, a wine cellar, and a beer room. The house also featured a day-tracker, a machine he had installed to keep track of the day of the week, but the tracker was too big to fit all of it on the first floor, so they dug a hole in the floor and into the basement, where the bottom of the tracker sits.

The garden had a lot of plants and vegetables from when he lived in Monticello. It was also a plantation, on which a lot of slaves worked. Mulberry Row was where the slaves slept, but it also had equipment for different professions that Jefferson assigned to the slaves. It is named Mulberry Row because Jefferson was planning on having mulberry trees planted, but realized they are very messy.

Scouts BSA Troop 270 stand in front of Monticello in Virginia, which was the primary residence and plantation of Thomas Jefferson.