Merchant and farmer John Coles (1745-1808) owned Enniscorthy, one of the largest landholdings in Albemarle County. His business and social relationship with TJ dated back to the 1770s. Martha Wayles Jefferson and Coles’s wife, Rebecca Elizabeth Tucker Coles, were friends, and hundreds of grafts from the Enniscorthy fruit trees helped stock Monticello. In 1781, it was to the Coles home that the Jefferson family first fled after escaping Monticello ahead of British troops. Later, Enniscorthy’s location between Monticello and Poplar Forest, and Coles’s friendship, made the estate a convenient stopping point for TJ as he traveled to his retreat. Coles’s son Isaac A. Coles became TJ’s private secretary in 1805 (J. Jefferson Looney and Ruth L. Woodward, Princetonians, 1791-1794: A Biographical Dictionary [Princeton, 1991], 256; Elizabeth Langhorne, K. Edward Lay, and William D. Rieley, A Virginia Family and Its Plantation Houses [Charlottesville, 1987], 17, 22; Madison, Papers, Sec. of State Ser. description begins William T. Hutchinson, Robert A. Rutland, J. C. A. Stagg, and others, eds., The Papers of James Madison, Chicago and Charlottesville, 1962- , 39 vols.; Sec. of State Ser., 1986- , 11 vols.; Pres. Ser., 1984- , 8 vols.; Ret. Ser., 2009- , 3 vols. description ends , 6:34n; MB description begins James A. Bear, Jr., and Lucia C. Stanton, eds., Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767-1826, Princeton, 1997, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Second Series description ends , 2:1160, 1187; Vol. 1:65).

the cherry was sawed: TJ and Coles worked out a system of bartering nails for cherry plank. Coles delivered “88 feet of cherry plank & 53 Ditto of Scantling” to Monticello in September 1804. In exchange, he received five loads of nails from TJ, beginning in August 1805 (John Coles Ledger, 1770-1807, in ViU; Vol. 40:389-90; Coles to TJ, 18 Sep. 1804).