From about 1775, free and enslaved workmen on Mulberry Row produced some of the finest woodwork in Virginia. At the nearby saw pit, sawyers and carpenters felled oak, beech, cherry, poplar, walnut, chestnut, locust, and pine in the surrounding forest and sawed them into timbers and planks. In the carpenter’s shop, workmen dried and roughed out planks, and in the joiner’s shop they used hand planes, chisels, saws, and lathes to turn them into doors, window frames, balusters, furniture, and carriages. Highly skilled joiner John Hemmings trained with white craftsmen for 10 years, learned from Scottish joiner David Watson, became James Dinsmore’s apprentice in 1798, and after Dinsmore left in 1809 took charge of the joiner’s shop, producing fine furniture, carriages, and agricultural machinery while training younger enslaved artisans, including his nephews Eston and Madison Hemmings. Head joiner James Dinsmore worked on the dependencies and dome and on interior finish work such as cornices, shutters, and door frames, managed operations during Jefferson’s presidency, and after 1809 helped build James Madison’s Montpelier and the University of Virginia. In 1799, Dinsmore and Hemmings prepared and put up the oval arch in the Book Room, spending 12 days sawing, planing, and bending tulip poplar wood for the arch between Jefferson’s study and library. An 1809 memorandum of carpenters’ tools belonging to Jefferson listed more than 125 hand planes, reflecting the specialized nature of the work.