Thomas Jefferson's smart home

Editor's Note: Correspondent Dyrinda Tyson's summer vacation took her to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's estate in Virginia. We asked her to write about the historic home.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Take a look above us, the tour guide suggested. So we dutifully looked up. High above us, incorporated into the portico ceiling, was a compass.

“Did you see the weather vane on the roof as we walked up?” our guide said. “It's attached to that compass. That way, Thomas Jefferson knew which way the wind was blowing without having to step out and look at the weather vane.”

The vane was also situated to where it was visible from parts of the house, so he didn't even have to go out as far as the portico.

If the concept had existed at the time, Jefferson's plantation home at Monticello might have been considered as something of an 18th-century smart home.

The weather vane still tracks the wind. The Great Clock nearby still tracks the time with accuracy, and it's wound with great ceremony each Sunday.

Inside the entrance hall, two sets of cannonball-like weights flanking the front door power the clock outside. The top ball on the right side also tracks the date and the approximate hour downward past markers on the wall.

The guide pointed to a hole in the floor under the weights. The weights proved too long for the entrance hall, he explained, so Jefferson simply had holes cut into the floor to accommodate them.

“You'll find the marker for Saturday down in the basement,” our guide said.

Work began on Monticello in 1768, slowly taking shape on a hilltop Jefferson explored as a boy. It was part of the Shadwell estate his father, Peter Jefferson, had established by 1740 with about 1,000 acres of farmland.

The elder Jefferson died in 1757, when his son was 14, and Shadwell was passed on to Thomas Jefferson when he came of age in 1764.

A portion of Monticello already was standing when the original Shadwell house burned in 1770. Jefferson built a new home for his mother and siblings, but he had other plans for himself.

“I have lately removed to the mountain,” he wrote to a friend in early 1771. “I have here but one room, which, like the cobler's (sic), serves me for parlour for kitchen and hall. I may add, for bed chamber and study too.”

Jefferson continued to expand and tweak Monticello's design for the next 40 years.

It still was relatively modest when he and his new bride, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, trudged up the hill through a blinding snowstorm — the snow was too deep for their phaeton, a type of sporty carriage — just days after their wedding in 1772. She only saw a portion of the work finished on Monticello, dying in 1782.

Monticello was all at once a home, a showcase, a farm and a laboratory. The garden supplied the household and served as a proving ground where Jefferson experimented with hundreds of varieties of plants from around the world.

Visitors of all stripes passed through the cavernous entrance hall, where Jefferson displayed a varied, wide-ranging, expansive array of mementos from his travels and his political life.

His private suite, though, was where Jefferson pursued his true passions ranging from astronomy to architecture, practically any subject underpinned by the unwavering logic of mathematics.

“No two men,” he once noted, “can differ on a principle of trigonometry.”

Seeking comforts

All of this could be seen as a perk for a wealthy gentleman farmer with enslaved labor on hand, and modern Monticello doesn't flinch from the subject. Tours and exhibits explore both the personal and industrial facets of slavery at Monticello, including Sally Hemings, who bore Jefferson several children.

But Monticello was also a home, and Jefferson was seeking the sort of comforts that might sound familiar today.

Storage, for example, was a must.

Not only did he need plenty of shelves for the books he said he couldn't live without, but a closet for many changes of clothes, space for horse and carriage, a kitchen big enough to feed numerous people and — in a time before refrigeration — a place to keep cold things cold.

Jefferson designed an ice house and had it built under the north terrace of the home, where a whole summer's worth of ice could be stored in the cavernous, cool darkness along with butters, cheeses, meat and other perishables. It stands here still, its whitewashed exterior intact belying the space inside.

“My ice house here has taken 62. Waggon (sic) loads of ice to fill it,” Jefferson wrote in March, 1812. “(I) have 1. foot thickness of shavings between it and the wall all around.”

Sometimes, though, he was simply fixing a problem. Take a leaky roof, for example.

Jefferson favored the low classic lines and domed roofs he encountered in Europe, but they presented drainage problems. His solution was to remove the shingles and replace them with “zigzag roof.”

His design called for sheet iron shaped into a series of “ridges & gutturs (sic),” as he wrote in his project notes. These formed channels that wicked water off the roof and eliminated the need for guttering.

It was an intricate design that called for an expert craftsman's touch. Later, Jefferson deployed a roofing system consisting of overlapping tin shingles, an advanced design that didn't require pricier roofing or tinsmith experts to install.

"The small metal plates were inexpensive and could be watertight,” one expert told The Washington Post in 1991 as roof restoration work got under way at Monticello. “Jefferson was simply trying to get the best roof he could for the least money."

That, too, might sound familiar.