Jefferson’s possessions find their way home : Museums, collectors lend Monticello items for a 250th birthday celebration.

If Americans can know a Founding Father by the way he arranged his furniture, made his bed and set his table, then Thomas Jefferson has been reborn in the rooms of Monticello.

To mark the 250th anniversary of Jefferson’s birth Tuesday, the curators of the grand masterpiece of presidential homes have mounted an exhibition of his belongings in what must be the quintessence of such displays.

The three-year search for Jefferson’s scattered possessions required more than a little curatorial sleuthing, for, as one guardian of the Jefferson legacy said only half in jest, “If all the sideboards said to have come from Monticello were set end to end, they would reach the 70 miles from here to Richmond.”

The search for Jefferson’s possessions also revealed a bit more of the man who was at once the genius of democracy and what Jefferson expert Susan Stein called a “one-man national academy of science.”

Stein, curator of Monticello, found that gathering the clocks, scientific instruments and paintings he owned broadened her view of Jefferson.

“I have an increased appreciation for his control over his life and respect for his productivity,” Stein said. “He was highly focused and rigorous in the way that he conducted his life, disciplined in making sure that every moment was turned toward something that would be productive for his country.”

Monticello in Jefferson’s day was a museum, a library, a laboratory and a farm as much as it was a family home. Jefferson designed the neoclassical house himself and supervised its construction over a 40-year period, completing it in 1809 after his second term as President. He furnished the house with items acquired in Europe, Philadelphia and New York during his years of public service. At the time, Charlottesville was at the edge of the frontier, and most of his neighbors lived in one-room cabins with dirt floors.

Jefferson had far more imagination, talent and energy than he had money, and when he died in 1826, he owed creditors more than $107,000, a substantial amount even today. To pay the debts, the family had to sell the entire contents of the house and eventually the house itself. The furnishings were sold in an estate auction to residents of the area, while the paintings and other art objects were shipped to dealers in Boston and Washington for sale on the art market.

When the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation acquired title to Monticello in 1923, it set out to gather as many original Jefferson items as possible for display in the ground floor of the restored house. But many of the most valuable and sought-after items had fallen into the hands of museums and private collectors loath to part with something that once belonged to such a great man.

Stein said that in 1989, she hit upon the idea of borrowing many items this year for the anniversary of Jefferson’s birth.

The foundation had good records on the whereabouts of some coveted belongings, based on original records from Monticello, the estate auction and subsequent research into museum and private collections. But even these records were sometimes out of date, Stein said, requiring her, for example, to track down the heir to the deceased cousin of a long departed aunt that the foundation’s records showed owned the item being sought.

She also sent a four-page list of “lost” items to 700 museums and other organizations hoping something would be found.

Eventually, some 75 museums and collectors agreed to lend 150 items for the yearlong exhibit. One work of art is “The Fright of Astyanax,” a pen and ink drawing done in 1797 by Benjamin West and now owned by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, Calif.

The result is that Monticello is currently much different from the one usually seen by the 500,000 tourists who visit the house each year. The entrance hall has more of the quality of a crowded natural history museum, with historic maps, mastodon fossils and Indian artifacts gathered by Jefferson. On the table in the tea room is the lapboard on which Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence (a special guard from the Smithsonian Institution is posted nearby).

“We’re redefining Jefferson for our times,” Stein said. “History is dynamic, and our views of history are very different in 1993 from the views held in 1943.”

She said that many pieces of the furniture in the display were made by slaves in the Monticello joinery, and a new appreciation for such craftsmanship has led the foundation to give more emphasis to the role of slaves in the upkeep of Jefferson’s house and farm.

“We want people to remember that it was Jefferson who articulated the idea that all men are created equal, but we also want people to know that all of his life, he was a slaveholder,” Stein said. “These are difficult issues in our time because we are concerned about racism. In the 1940s, people didn’t talk about Jefferson as a slaveholder, but today we do.”