Each year, half a million people visit Thomas Jefferson’s home in Charlottesville. Monticello offers a variety of tours featuring the house, the enslaved community, the gardens and grounds. This year, program director Rachel Baum says guests can also opt for a special guide.
“Jefferson spent his final years in retirement here at Monticello, and Bill Barker has actually been portraying Thomas Jefferson since the 1980’s, and in his retirement years has come here to Monticello to help portray Thomas Jefferson as he is reflecting back on 50 years since the Declaration of Independence.”
As he walked through the house Jefferson designed and refined over forty years, he would pass dozens of souvenirs from a rich life in politics and scholarship. There is his library of 25-hundred books proudly displayed by Barker.
“Welcome to my third library! Perhaps you heard that my second – near 7,000 volumes – I sold to our nation to replenish the library of Congress, burned of course when the British attacked our federal city back in 18 and 14," he explains.
There are tools he invented, native American objects brought home by his adventurous personal secretary, Merriwether Lewis, things that belonged to his wife Martha who died at 33 from complications of childbirth. And there are portraits and busts of his good friends – George Washington, James Madison and John Adams.
“Mr. Adams and I happily are corresponding, one with the other. I look upon it as old man’s milk," he says with a chuckle. "One of his letters is worth two from me in reply. Oh, I know many consider us to have been foes at one time, but we are still deeply friends. I have a very fine likeness of him here if you will follow me.”
And, of course, there’s an original print of the Declaration of Independence, signed by 56 leaders of a new nation:
“If there’s one thing we held in common, it was the common knowledge of what we were setting out to do, not only for ourselves as Americans but for the family of man across the globe," Barker says — basing his remark on the writings of Jefferson.
"To relate, in good, common sense, when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them – one and the other – this is in nature for a people to do so.”
Tours will be held at the end of the day – Wednesday through Saturday – limited to 20 people who will each pay $150 to spend an hour with the nation’s leading Jefferson impersonator.
