After their marriage, Tom and Martha began their trek to the as yet only minimally completed Monticello. They had to travel more than 100 miles without plane, or boat, or automobile. In the cold and on not quite decent roads. (She must have really loved Tom!)

When they finally arrived, Martha got her first view of the partly completed mansion. Well, it wasn’t a mansion yet. They arrived in the midst of a blustery snowstorm. Martha got her first view of her new home. The still small new home clung to the top of a hill and was dark and empty.

The only completed structure where they would spend their first many months was what they later called their “honeymoon suite.” It was a small, cold one-room shelter. Tom built a fire and then opened a hidden bottle of wine to warm them. Their sheer happiness of belonging to each other seemed to lighten the one room.

The honeymoon lasted until April. Work on the main house was well underway, but not yet livable.

On September 27,1772, Martha gave birth to their first child. She was small and sickly and they worried that she might not live. But she grew stronger and outlived both her mother and her father. They named her Martha. Together they had six children, but only 2 daughters survived to adulthood, Martha and Mary.

On September 6, 1782, Martha, Tom’s beloved wife, passed away. Tom wrote “My dear wife passed away on this day at 11:45 am”. Tom also wrote that their life together brought Tom “ten years of uncheckered happiness.”

His daughter, Martha, added after his wife, Martha’s death: “When at last he left his room, he rode out, and from that time he was incessantly on horseback, rambling about the mountain in the lease frequented roads, and just as often through the woods. In those melancholy rambles I was his constant companion—a solitary witness to many a burst of grief.”
He never remarried. He burned their correspondence. Martha should belong to him, not to history. He truly loved her.