Thomas Jefferson was a boy of seventeen, tall, raw-boned, freckled, and sandy-haired. He came to Williamsburg from the far west of Virginia, to enter the College of William and Mary.
With his large feet and hands, his thick wrists, and prominent cheek bones and chin, he could not have been accounted handsome or graceful. He is described, however, as a fresh, bright, healthy-looking youth, as straight as a gun-barrel, sinewy and strong, with that alertness of movement which comes of early familiarity with saddle, gun, canoe, and minuet. His teeth, too, were perfect. His eyes, which were of hazel-gray, were beaming and expressive.
His home, Shadwell Farm, was a hundred and fifty miles to the north-west of Williamsburg among the mountains of central Virginia. It was a plain, spacious farmhouse, a story and a half high, with four large rooms and a wide entry on the ground floor, and many garret chambers above. The farm was nineteen hundred acres of land, part of it densely wooded, and some of it so steep and rocky as to be unfit for cultivation. The farm was tilled by thirty slaves.
And Thomas Jefferson, this student of seventeen, through the death of his father, was already the head of the family, and under a guardian, the owner of Shadwell Farm, the best portion of his father’s estate.
His father, Peter Jefferson, had been a wonder of physical force and stature. He had the strength of three strong men. Two hogsheads of tobacco, each weighing a thousand pounds, he could raise at once from their sides, and stand them upright. When surveying in the Wilderness, he could tire out his assistants, and tire out his mules; then eat his mules, and still press on, sleeping alone by night in a hollow tree to the howling of the wolves, till his task was done.
From this natural chief of men, Thomas Jefferson derived his stature, his erectness, and his bodily strength.
James Parton (Arranged)
A CHRISTMAS GUEST
Shadwell Farm was a good farm to grow up on. Thomas Jefferson and his noisy crowd of schoolfellows hunted on a mountain near by, which abounded in deer, turkeys, foxes, and other game. Jefferson was a keen hunter, eager for a fox, swift of foot and sound of wind, coming in fresh and alert after a long day’s clambering hunt.
He studied hard, for he liked books as much as fox-hunting. Soon he began to be impatient to enter college. Then, too, he had never seen a town nor even a village of twenty houses, and he was curious to know something of the great world. His guardian consenting, he bade farewell to his mother and sisters, and set off for Williamsburg, a five days’ long ride from his home.