He went often to visit Mrs. Skelton who made her home with her father after her bereavement. Usually he took his violin under his arm, and out of the harmonies which came from the instrument and the lady’s spinet came the greater one of love.
They were married in January of 1772. The ceremony took place at “The Forest” in Charles City County. The chronicles describe the bride as a beautiful woman, a little above medium height, finely formed, and with graceful carriage. She was well educated, read a great deal, and played the spinet unusually well.
The wedding journey was a strange one. It was a hundred miles from “The Forest” to Monticello, and years afterward their eldest daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, described it as follows:
“They left ‘The Forest’ after a fall of snow, light then, but increasing in depth as they advanced up the country. They were finally obliged to quit the carriage and proceed on horseback. They arrived late at night, the fires were all out, and the servants had retired to their own houses for the night. The horrible dreariness of such a house, at the end of such a journey, I have often heard both relate.”
Yet, the walls of Monticello, that afterwards looked down upon so much sorrow and so much joy, must have long remembered the home-coming of master and mistress, for the young husband found a bottle of old wine “on a shelf behind some books,” built a fire in the open fireplace, and “they laughed and sang together like two children.”
And that life upon the hills proved very nearly ideal. They walked and planned and rode together, and kept house and garden books in the most minute fashion.
Births and deaths followed each other at Monticello, but there was nothing else to mar the peace of that happy home. Between husband and wife there was no strife or discord, not a jar nor a rift in that unity of life and purpose which welds two souls into one.
Childish voices came and went, but two daughters grew to womanhood, and in the evening, the day’s duties done, violin and harpsichord sounded sweet strains together.
They reared other children besides their own, taking the helpless brood of Jefferson’s sister into their hearts and home when Dabney Carr died. Those three sons and three daughters were educated with his own children, and lived to bless him as a second father.