Welcome to the American Story.

Stories about what it is that makes America beautiful.

Heartbreaking, funny, inspiring, and endlessly interesting.

This is Chris Flannery with the Cramoni. inspiring and

inspiring.

this is Chris Flannery with the Kramon Institute.

I call this one relics and reverence.

When you make your American pilgrimage to Manicello, the classically beautiful home Thomas Jefferson designed and lived in on a hilltop in Albemarle County, Virginia, You find displayed there a small chip of wood, with this irreverently

humorous note from Jefferson. A chip cut from an armed chair in the chimney corner in Shakespeare's house at Stratford-on-Avon,

said to be the identical chair in which he usually sat.

If true, like the relics of the Saints, it must miraculously reproduce

itself.

Jefferson and John Adams visited Stratford-uponon on April 6th, 1786, while their countrymen back home,

having won their independence only a few years before, were heading toward constitutional crisis.

The only contemporary record Jefferson left of the visit

was a note on the price of admission to Shakespeare's birthplace and tomb.

But Abigail Adams many years later added color to the picture. In a letter to her grandson, George Washington Adams, she

wrote that when your grandfather visited the spot where

Shakespeare was born with Mr Jefferson, Mr Jefferson fell upon the ground and

kissed it.

Your grandfather, not quite so enthusiastic,

contended himself with cutting a relic from his chair,

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