U.Va. Professor's Digital Recreation Gives Life to Monticello's Mulberry Row

by Jane Ford

Mulberry Row was once Main Street at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello plantation, a bustling community of activity that included storage sheds; housing for enslaved and free workers; workshops including a smokehouse and dairy, a nailery, an iron shop, joinery and other manufacturing enterprises along a 1,000 foot-long road south of the main house.

Today, little remains – a workman's house and later a textile workshop, part of the original stable and a few visible foundations along a row of newly planted mulberry trees. Until now, visitors had to imagine what the structures looked like and the lives and activities that filled them.

Earl Mark, a professor in the University of Virginia' School of Architecture, is helping to bring Mulberry Row back to life through a digital re-creation of the structures that builds upon 50 years of research by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Monticello, archeologists and historians. He also called on his experience creating digital re-constructions for exhibitions at Jamestown and Menokin Plantation in Warsaw, Va., and has created similar models of Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin Building in Buffalo, N.Y. for the the National Building Museum, and of U.Va.'s Academical Village for the kickoff of the University's capital campaign in 2006.

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