"Mem^sup dm.^ of Carpenters tools": Woodworking Tools at Monticello

Chronicle of the Early American Industries Association, Inc., The, Mar 2005 by Self, Robert, Stanton, Lucia

There were at least three sets of woodworking tools at Monticello: the tools in the joinery on Mulberry Row, and other shops on the plantation;1 tools that belonged to workmen hired over a forty-year period; and Thomas Jefferson's personal collection, kept in the house. Although scarcely anything survives from these varied and often overlapping collections, Jefferson's carefully preserved documentary record can shed light on what was certainly one of the best-equipped plantations in Virginia.

Jefferson's public duties seldom allowed him to follow the pursuits of his own choice. In his rare moments of freedom, as a number of contemporary observers tell us, he often turned to his tools and workbench. Isaac Jefferson, a former Monticello slave and himself a very skilled metalworker, remembered that "My Old Master was neat a hand as ever you see to make keys and locks and small chains, iron and brass." Recalling Monticello in the early 1780s, he said that his master "kept all kind of blacksmith and carpenter tools in a great case with shelves to it in his library." When in London in 1786, Thomas Jefferson bought a gentleman's tool chest for �11 3s from ironmonger Thomas Robinson. He described it as "a box containing small tools tor wooden and iron work, for my own amusement." Twenty years later Margaret Bayard Smith noted a set of carpenters' tools in a drawer in Jefferson's study in the White House and Charles Willson Peale, after a visit to Washington in 1804, recorded that the president was "fond of Mechanicks & amuses himself very often by working at Cabinet work."2

Henry S. Randall, who gathered information tor his 1865 biography from Jefferson's grandchildren, wrote that Jefferson "had a particular shop of his own filled with choice and multifarious tools, and here he made and repaired the wooden portions of his philosophical, engineering, and other scientific instruments-made models in architecture (of which he was excessively fond), and hewed out 'mold-boards of least resistance.'" A handful of tools (awl, crucible, gimlet, and folding rule) are the sole possible survivors of Jefferson's tool collection. And of the many objects, from locks and chains to models and "curious implements," that he made at his workbench in the South Piazza at Monticello, only a small bookcase is now attributed to him.3

Fortunately, we know more about the tools of the plantation shop on Mulberry Row from an inventory prepared by James Dinsmore on his departure from Monticello in April 1809 (Figure 1). This "very fine housejoiner" had spent more than ten years at Monticello as the principal workman in the extensive remodeling that transformed the house into the icon familiar to us all. Dinsmore may have been separating his own tools from Jefferson's as he and fellow joiner John Neilson prepared to leave Monticello to work for James Madison at Montpelier in nearby Orange County.4

Readers of The Chronicle will immediately recognize this as an extremely comprehensive set of tools.5 The extraordinary nature of this list is confirmed by comparison with benchmark tool inventories, such as the famous chest with a virtually intact set of tools purchased in London in 1790 by Joseph Seaton for his son Benjamin, and the tools owned by Edmund Dickinson, who operated the Anthony Hay shop in Williamsburg from 1771 to 1776.6 The sheer number of planes can be used as a rough but telling gauge: Benjamin Seaton's chest contained 78 planes, Dickinson owned 81, and Jefferson had a total of 127.7 The three lists do not parallel one another completely as Seaton and Dickinson were both cabinetmakers while Jefferson's tools were assembled principally for house joinery.8 This means that there are plane types on Dinsmore's list, such as cornice planes,9 that were not owned by either Seaton or Dickinson. Conversely, there are examples of specialized cabinet planes owned by Seaton, such as table planes and cock bead planes, that were not owned by Jefferson.

It is not entirely clear where Jefferson acquired all of these tools. There are scattered references to tool purchases in his letters and memorandum books, a record of his expenditures from 1707 until his death in 1826.10 A letter of 1793 suggests a rather meager collection as well as one that was partly homemade. Anticipating the arrival of joiner David Watson, Jefferson wrote, "He will have to vamp up my old set of tools and make the most of them, and what is necessary in addition to these, and cannot be made by himself and George, I will send from hence."11 The record is silent until June 1798, when in Philadelphia Jefferson paid the newly hired James Dinsmore $64.55 "for tools purchased of him & sent on to Monticello."12 Based on the dollar-sterling exchange rate at the time, Jefferson paid almost as much as the �15 10s 4d Joseph Seaton spent in London two years earlier. Thus, this purchase-Jefferson's only known major tool acquisition other than his own tool chest-may represent at least a substantial percentage of the tools ultimately listed in 1809.13