Thank you Martha, Anita, Mary, Jon, and the others who responded to my query about Jefferson's soap. I am trying to get a sense of how much time and labor went into a slave making soap on her own. From discussions with the archaeologists at Monticello and with Leni Sorensen, and from Peter Hatch, I learned that these seemingly trivial sales of eggs, chickens, cucumbers, soap, etc, required very non-trivial investments of labor and time by the slaves. Some of them were running rather large operations in the scant free time available to them, involving the construction of hen houses and fenced areas, recruiting children and the elderly to tend gardens and chickens, etc etc. The transactions in the mistress's account books reveal that a lot of invisible work was going on. Henry Wiencek