The expert guest for “KEY” was Adam Erby. 

Adam Erby is a Curator at George Washington’s Mount Vernon who is a specialist in furniture and historic interiors. Erby, who ​​was born and raised in south central Virginia among a family of antiques experts, holds degrees from the University of Virginia and the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture. Among the many exhibitions and projects he has worked on is the restoration and reinterpretation of both the large dining room, or “New Room,” and the Front Parlor at Mount Vernon.

 

For more on Erby’s thoughts on being a curator, click here 

For more on the Key to the Bastille, click here.

For other resources from Mount Vernon click here and here

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Related objects of interest:

Edward Savage’s well-known “Liberty, in the form of the goddess of youth, giving support to the bald eagle” (1796)--note the key to the Bastille under her foot! Jefferson hung a copy at Monticello.

Scale Model of the Bastille, Musée de Carnavalet, Paris

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Further reading:

• Aurrichio, Laura.  THE MARQUIS: Lafayette Reconsidered (Knopf, October 2014 / Vintage, August 2015).

• Chervinsky, Lindsay M. “The Enslaved Household of President George Washington,” White House Historical Association.

• Coe, Alexis. You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington (Viking, 2020).

• Dunbar, Erica Armstrong. Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (37 Ink, 2017). For younger readers, see her children’s book on the same subject.

• George Washington’s Mount Vernon. “The Bastille Key Case Conservation.” Accessed August 2, 2023. . 

  • “Bastille Key.” Accessed August 2, 2023. . 

• Georgini, Sara. “How the Key to the Bastille Ended Up in George Washington’s Possession.” Smithsonian Magazine. July 14, 2016.  

• Perl-Rosenthal, Nathan. The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It (Basic Books, 2024).

• Thiery, Clement. “The Bastille Key, a French Relic in America.” France-Amerique. July 8, 2020.  

• White, Ashli. Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and Politics in the Late Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2023).