Daniel P. Jordan, 85; Monticello leader and Jefferson scholar
Historian broadened programs to include issues of slavery,race
Daniel P. Jordan, a historian who guided Monticello into the 21st century, safeguarding President Thomas Jefferson’s mountaintop plantation while broadening its educational programs to encompass discussions of slavery and race, died March 21 in Charlottesville. He was 85.
The cause was a heart attack, said his daughter Katherine Jordan.
A dapper Mississippi native with a Ph.D. in history, Jordan presided over Monticello for 23 years, serving as executive director and then president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation until his retirement in 2008. The group has owned the Charlottesville estate since 1923, preserving the property while educating visitors on the life of the nation’s third president, a selftaught architect who designed, built and rebuilt the house for more than four decades.
Under Jordan (pronounced JUR-dun), Monticello became more of a center for education and scholarship, even as it continued to draw about a half-million visitors a year. Monticello’s current leader, Jane Kamensky, described him in a tribute as “the most consequential president on the Mountaintop since Jefferson himself.”
“In the development of Monticello, he really defined what a historic house site could be,” said Sara Bon-Harper, who worked under Jordan as an archaeology research manager and now runs President James Monroe’s nearby estate, Highland. In a phone interview, she recalled that Jordan persuasively argued “that scholarship undergirds all interpretation,” and used his prodigious fundraising abilities to expand Monticello’s research departments, construct a library and establish an international center for Jefferson studies.
“I’m concerned with sharing knowledge,” Jordan told the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 1985, when he first arrived at Monticello. “I think it’s a missionary impulse I have. I think it’s important not to hoard a heritage.”
As a history professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Jordan had sought to educate the general public, not just future academics. Declaring that he was “against historians who talk only to other historians,” he delivered lectures that were broadcast on public radio and led classes for inmates at the Virginia State Penitentiary.
He brought a similarly expansive approach to education at Monticello, highlighting the site’s history in national media appearances and documentaries and directing a summer seminar for teachers from around the country. He also sought to correct a glaring omission from Monticello’s tours, noting that when he visited the site before taking the job, he was dismayed to learn that interpreters made no reference to the fact that Jefferson owned a plantation, not just a house, and enslaved more than 600 people during his lifetime.
“We’re going to try to tell the most honest story we can about Jefferson and slavery and race and the plantation,” he told staff, “and it’s all going to be based on serious scholarship.”
Two years into his tenure, Monticello and the University of Virginia, founded by Jefferson just a few miles down the road, were together named a UNESCO World Heritage site.
The recognition drew further attention to Monticello, where Jordan welcomed dignitaries including the Dalai Lama, in addition to greeting unassuming visitors arriving by minivan or tour bus. With help from the ticket office, he set up a “Magnolia Alert” so that he could offer an effusive hello to anyone who arrived with a Mississippi license plate. (Within a few minutes, he could usually find a point of connection. He returned to his home state each summer to vacation at the Neshoba County Fair, which calls itself “Mississippi’s Giant Houseparty.”)
Jordan was credited with overhauling the Thomas Jefferson Foundation from the bottom up, soliciting staff input while developing a new strategic plan, streamlining the organization’s mission and strengthening its finances. He carried out aggressive fundraising efforts, including through a collaboration with the U.S. Mint for the 250th anniversary of Jefferson’s birth, which was marked with a 1993 commemorative coin.
The silver dollar initiative raised $5 million for Monticello, providing the seed money for a newly created endowment that grew to $120 million by the time Jordan retired, according to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.
Under his leadership, Monticello expanded its property and protected its views of the Blue Ridge Mountains, acquiring nearby Montalto mountain and opening a popular hiking and biking trail along the Thomas Jefferson Parkway. Jordan also oversaw the restoration of the plantation’s historic vineyard and road system; the identification and dedication of a burial ground for enslaved people; and a much-needed rebuilding of the house’s leaky roof.
“It leaked for him, and it leaks for us,” he told the New York Times in 1990. “We have patches on patches and buckets. In a storm, we hold our breaths.”
Perhaps his biggest challenge was figuring out how to navigate the nearly 200-year debate surrounding the relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who was said to have born several of his children. Early in his tenure, Jordan invited descendants of Hemings to commemorative events at Monticello, although he avoided taking a firm stance on the paternity issue as skeptics insisted there was no hard evidence.
“If there’s anything like a party line, it’s simply this: We cannot prove it, we can’t disprove it,” he said.
But in 1998, a genetic study published in the scientific journal Nature concluded that Jefferson almost certainly fathered a child with Hemings.
Jordan moved swiftly, holding a news conference and instructing Monticello’s interpreters to initiate conversations with visitors about the study.