Long before Jefferson built his retreat house here, he had enslaved men, women, and older children working the tobacco and wheat fields, going "into the ground," as he called it. They planted up to 300,000 hillocks of tobacco each year, and it took 18 months of backbreaking labor from sunup to sundown to bring it to market. Jefferson disliked tobacco and wanted to stop growing it but was financially dependent on it. When Jefferson died in 1826, his grandson Francis Eppes inherited Poplar Forest and lived here with his wife, Elizabeth. She called tobacco a "vile weed" and said she and Francis were "much wearied and sickened with a planters life." They sold Poplar Forest and moved to Florida in 1828, selling some enslaved people and taking others along to a new plantation. In 1781, Jefferson called tobacco "a culture productive of infinite wretchedness," writing that those employed in it were in a continued state of exertion beyond the powers of nature to support, that little food was raised, and that the men, animals, and earth on such farms suffered.