Monticello, the house Thomas Jefferson could not stop rebuilding

Thomas Jefferson began leveling the top of a small Virginia mountain in 1768, when he was twenty five. He was still tearing out walls fifty years later. Monticello was less a house than a lifelong argument he was having with himself in brick.

The first version was finished enough to live in by the 1770s. Then he went to France as minister, saw the new domed houses of Paris, came home and had much of his own house demolished so he could start again. The second Monticello doubled in size, gained an octagonal dome, and hid its stairs in narrow side passages because he considered grand staircases a waste of heated space.

He filled it with contraptions. A clock in the entrance hall tells the day of the week by weights descending along the wall, and the last two days had to be marked in the basement because the ceiling was not high enough. Double doors in the parlor open together, linked by a chain hidden in the floor. A dumbwaiter built into the fireplace brings wine up from the cellar without a servant entering the room.

That last detail is the tell. Monticello was engineered to make labor invisible. More than 400 enslaved people lived and worked on the plantation across Jefferson's life, and the passages under the house were their corridors. The nailery run by enslaved boys funded much of the construction. Sally Hemings, enslaved at Monticello, bore six children whom evidence indicates Jefferson fathered.

He died on July 4, 1826, more than $100,000 in debt. To settle it, his family sold the furniture, the land, and 130 human beings.

The house was rescued in the 1920s and today the tour tells both halves of the story, the clocks and the nailery, in the same rooms.