Elizabeth House Trist (ca. 1751–1828) was the daughter of Mary Stretch House, the widow of Nicholas Trist, a British army officer, and the grandmother of Nicholas P. Trist, who married TJ’s granddaughter Virginia Jefferson Randolph at Monticello in 1824. Elizabeth Trist is best known for her journal detailing a trip to Natchez, 1783–84. TJ formed an enduring friendship with her when he stayed at her mother’s Philadelphia boardinghouse during service in the Continental Congress, 1782–84. He advised her in recurring financial difficulties, wrote her regularly, persuaded her to move her family to Albemarle County in 1798, and appointed her only child, Hore Browse Trist, port collector for the lower Mississippi River in 1803, upon which she moved with him to New Orleans. Hore Browse Trist died in 1804 and Elizabeth Trist returned to Virginia in 1808, spending some of her remaining years as an itinerant houseguest at a variety of Albemarle County estates, including Monticello, where she died and is buried in an unmarked grave (William L. Andrews, ed., Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women’s Narratives [1990], 183–7; Jane Flaherty Wells, “Thomas Jefferson’s Neighbors: Hore Browse Trist of ‘Birdwood’ and Dr. William Bache of ‘Franklin,’” MACH description begins Magazine of Albemarle County History, 1940– description ends 47 [1989]: 1–13; Mary Brown Trist Jones to Harriot Brown, 6 Aug. 1809, and Virginia Jefferson Randolph Trist to Nicholas P. Trist, 10 Dec. 1828 [NcU: NPT]).

William brown, the brother of Elizabeth Trist’s daughter-in-law Mary, became port collector after Hore Browse Trist’s death. Mary Brown Trist remarried Philip Livingston Jones. William Brown sold some of his plantation land to Jones to satisfy his own debts, and Brown agreed to provide for his nephews Nicholas P. Trist and Hore Browse Trist Jr. Evidently Brown also assisted Elizabeth Trist and his sister harriot Brown, who accompanied Trist on her travels in Virginia (Madison, Papers description begins William T. Hutchinson, Robert A. Rutland, John C. A. Stagg, and others, eds., The Papers of James Madison, 1962– , 31 vols.: Congress. Ser., 17 vols.; Pres. Ser., 5 vols.; Sec. of State Ser., 6 vols description ends , Pres. Ser., 2:424–6).