Joseph Slaughter (d. 1846), plantation owner and local official, came from a prominent Culpeper County family that moved to Bedford County in the 1770s. In 1803 he became a lieutenant in the militia. Three years later he rose to the rank of captain and became a justice of the peace. TJ obtained occasional help from Slaughter in surveying and in managing Poplar Forest. During 1832–34 he was county sheriff. At his death Slaughter owned more than twenty slaves (Ackerly and Parker, Our Kin description begins Mary Denham Ackerly and Lula Eastman Jeter Parker, “Our Kin”: The Genealogies of Some of the Early Families who Made History in the Founding and Development of Bedford County, Virginia [1930] description ends , 259–61; Bedford Co. Order Book, 13:18, 377–8, 16:147, 22:226, 23:56, 446, 24:297, 29:118; TJ to Slaughter, 8 Sept. 1813; Charles Clay to TJ, 23 May 1815; Bedford Co. Will Book, 12:155–6, 179–81, 214–9).

In his Weather Memorandum Book, Nov. 1802–Dec. 1816 (MHi; image of this page reproduced elsewhere in this volume), TJ specified the extent of the rains of May 1812 at Monticello: “between the 7th & 22d there fell 9.6 I. and something more, the bottle having been overflowed during the last rain in fact the whole fell in the course of 10. days.”