Behind the scenes at Jefferson's Monticello

By Rachana Dixit
Monticello will soon open up a number of new features on Thomas Jefferson's famed estate, many of which have rarely been available for exploration by the general public.
The dome room on the top floor of the house, accessible only by climbing steep, narrow stairs and painted a brilliant yellow with circular windows surrounding its walls, will be open as a part of the new "Behind the Scenes" tour.
The new tour will take place twice daily from June 11 through Sept. 6.
"This is obviously something people have really wanted to see for a long time," said Susan R. Stein, the Richard Gilder senior curator and vice president of museum programs at Monticello.
The room, which has never been a part of daytime guided tours, is one of four rooms that will be shown to visitors to allow them to get a new and different look of the third president's house. Though revered as an architectural wonder, Stein said, the dome room was never really used publicly by Monticello's inhabitants and visitors.
Nonetheless, she said, "We're really excited about being able to show this space."
The new tour features are being revealed roughly a year after Monticello's 42,000-square-foot, $43 million high-tech visitors center opened to the public.
Rooms on the second floor will also be on display on the Behind the Scenes tour, so visitors will be able to catch glimpses of Monticello's more hidden aspects - including family life, the routines of slaves and how historic preservationists go about restoring such a place.
"It's been a great pent-up demand of visitors saying, when can we go upstairs?" said David Ronka, Monticello's manager of special programs.
In a similar vein, also on June 11, Monticello will be opening up an exhibit titled "Crossroads." The exhibit, complete with life-sized figures of prominent residents and interactive components, will be installed in the house's central cellar space and will focus on the work and the people required to sustain Jefferson's household.
"It's about the intersection of the people who carried out the work of the house," Stein said, adding that they have intensively worked on the exhibition for about a year. "It's going to be like you're meeting people for the first time. We're bringing new people to the foreground here."
Those individuals include Jefferson's daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph; Harriet Hemings, a slave girl who learned needlework and other skills from female relatives; and Burwell Colbert, an enslaved butler. The exhibition is a result of decades of research - Elizabeth Chew, the curator at Monticello, said research of Monticello's slave community has been going on for 30 years by conducting oral histories and looking through items such as Jefferson's correspondence and plantation records.
Several areas have also recently been restored, including the kitchen, wine cellar and Jefferson's dining room, now repainted chrome yellow because it was recently discovered to be the original pigment chosen.
Between 1936 and February of this year, the dining room's walls were painted blue, and Chew said only after a new microscopic technology became available did the foundation realize the error.
"This has really taught us that we need to go back and do it everywhere," Chew said.
The Behind the Scenes tour costs $37, which includes admission to Monticello. More information about the new features can be found at www.monticello.org.