Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest

Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest will enhance learning opportunities for visitors by designing and building a network of wayside and trailhead exhibit stations along a new entrance road to the plantation. The stations will use interpretive and site orientation signs; artifacts and touchable reproductions from the Poplar Forest's archaeological collections; touchable, interactive props; and life-sized sculptural figures to invite visitors to explore the lives of Jefferson and all the free and enslaved people who lived and toiled on his plantation. The interpretive goal of the project is to illustrate Jefferson's relationship to slavery and how his life and accomplishments, at Poplar Forest and elsewhere, were inextricably intertwined with the system of slavery in the young nation.