A PLACE FOR REFLECTION
The Contemplative Site at the end of Mulberry Row — once the main street of the 5,000- acre Monticello plantation — will be dedicated during this year’s Juneteenth celebration. Globally renowned architect and Monticello board member Peter Cook of HGA, one of the primary designers of the National Museum of African American History & Culture, along with Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects developed the design in collaboration with descendants of the enslaved community and staff from the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. A wall of Corten steel forms the site’s principal feature. Inspired by the empowering message of Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise,” the weathered steel is perforated by an increasingly dense number of openings as it emerges from the ground once worked by the enslaved. The openings hold the names of the 607 identified men, women and children enslaved by Jefferson during his lifetime. Empty openings incorporated into the design allow for new names to be added as they are discovered. The Contemplative Site provides a space for reflecting on the experience of slavery at Monticello, the people entangled in it, and the impact still felt by society today. The Contemplative Site is made possible by support from Fritz and Claudine Kundrun, Americana Foundation and HGA Architects.
freedom. Aurelia Crawford, Brandon Dillard and Christa Dierksheide kept it going until I was hired in 2016. Since my departure for graduate school, public historian and director of Getting Word Andrew Davenport and Getting Word project assistant Jenna Owens have continued to move the project into new territory. Each generation of leaders has infused the project with something special. Davenport and Owens hope to make Getting Word available to an even wider audience by digitizing it and expanding the outreach to younger members of the Getting Word community. Owens says that seeing descendants on tours and interacting with them has reinforced the fact that Getting Word is very much alive and well. Descendants keep history relevant, and she hopes that the project will be a vehicle for preparing descendants who are members of younger generations to receive the baton passed to them by their elders and ancestors. Along with ongoing support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Monticello will continue to expand the reach and impact of Getting Word through a generous $3.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation. Descendants are also taking things into their own hands. In June 2022, artist Jabari Jefferson created a portrait of how he imagined his Monticello ancestors would have memorialized those who were buried at the Burial Ground for Enslaved People.
About the author: Niya Bates previously served as Monticello’s director of African American history and Getting Word African American Oral History Project. She is currently Monticello’s senior fellow for African American history and a Ph.D. candidate in both the Department of History and Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Many descendants have grown up with Getting Word , and many staff from its early days remain connected with Monticello. Reflecting on her hopes for the next 30 years of the project, Gray says, “We are living in an era where people feel lied to about the past. Getting Word showed that slavery should be taught and interpreted at plantations like Monticello. Now we have to ensure that this information is widely available and usable.”
Section of steel wall showing names of people who were enslaved at Monticello.
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