James Dinsmore (ca. 1772–1830), house joiner, was a native of Ulster living in Philadelphia in 1798 when he began a decade of service with TJ at Monticello. In anticipation of his 17 Apr. 1809 settlement of accounts with TJ, Dinsmore compiled this tool list, distinguishing between those borrowed or purchased from TJ and those presumably left at Monticello. With carpenter John Neilson, who had worked with him at Monticello since 1804, Dinsmore then worked for three years on renovations to Montpellier, James Madison’s house. Dinsmore co-owned a mill at Pen Park near Charlottesville with John H. Craven from 1811 to 1815, settled in Charlottesville after 1818, and worked as the principal master carpenter at the University of Virginia and on renovations to Bremo, John Hartwell Cocke’s house, before drowning in the Rivanna River (PTJ description begins Julian P. Boyd, Charles T. Cullen, John Catanzariti, Barbara B. Oberg, and others, eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1950– , 31 vols. description ends , 30:249; MB description begins James A. Bear Jr. and Lucia C. Stanton, eds., Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826, 1997, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Second Series description ends , 2:985, 991, 1245; TJ to Madison, 23 Sept. 1808 [DLC]; Lay, Architecture description begins K. Edward Lay, The Architecture of Jefferson Country: Charlottesville and Albemarle County, Virginia, 2000 description ends , 96–8; Charlottesville Virginia Advocate, 14 May 1830).

Planes, chisels, gouges, gimlets, and drawknives are used for fine woodwork such as window trim, wainscoting, and pilasters. hollows & rounds are planes used for shaping, the former concave and the latter convex. A rabbitt (rabbet) is a long groove cut at right angles (Carl R. Lounsbury, An Illustrated Glossary of Early Southern Architecture & Landscape [1994], 159, 303).