Monticello - Thomas Jefferson's Mountaintop Retreat

If you are looking for one of the greatest places to visit in the state of Virginia that you will remember for a life-time, it has to be Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home. I would like to take you on a brief journey of Jefferson's home and life as if you were listening right along with me!

For 19 days, Thomas Jefferson wrote nothing. The dedication letter writer had taken his bride, Martha, to the south pavilion, their honeymoon cottage, in late January of 1772. This tiny brick building was but a single room at the time, 18 feet square, built over a ground-level kitchen. Martha peered out at the rolling Virginia Mountains and venturing outside, looked down on the tiny village of Charlottesville. From her small abode, she could asses the progress on the construction of a much larger brick structure that was taking shape nearby. This grand architectural experiment on Jefferson's mountaintop took 40 years to complete. Unfortunately Martha would not live to see the final masterpiece; she died just 10 years after she married.

Monticello, Italian for "little mountain," is a description that might have been contested by those who climbed its 867 feet hauling stone and timber. Other Virginia planters built their houses in the well-watered lowlands, not on peaks that required slave labor to level the ground by hand.

Monticello reflected the many talents of its owner, a lawyer by profession with an intense and consuming interest in architecture. Nothing like it had ever been built in America

Monticello is the only one in the United States that is included on the United Nations' World Heritage List of International Treasures. About 60% of its furnishings are believed to be original. Even if the property and house were merely ordinary, they would merit attention simply because they were designed by Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. His achievements are indeed impressive; governor of Virginia, second vice president, and third president. He also sponsored the Lewis and Clark expedition and nearly doubled the nation's land holdings with the Louisiana Purchase.

A long winding walk-way leads from the West Front, which is depicted on the American nickel, to the entrance of the house. The original pathway was revealed when researchers shone their headlights across the grass at night. Jefferson has planted flowers that blossomed from April through October. Twenty oval beds, each planted with a variety of species, surrounded the house.

Jefferson was fonder of eating vegetables than meat, Jefferson maintained an extensive vegetable garden, that, seen today from the air, resembles a 1,000-foot length of train track, neatly segmented into plots for fruits and vegetables. He was both a garden and a laboratory, because Jefferson imported seeds from Europe and the other parts of the New World, declaring that one of the greatest services a person could render to his country was to "add a useful plant to its culture." At Monticello he experimented with 250 known varieties of more than 70 species keeping extensive records on how well they adapted to the climate and soil. Many of these plants are still cultivated in the re-created garden.

Jefferson was particularly proud of the peaches, grapes, almonds, and pomegranates he was able to cultivate on his estate. Today you can wander among the restored orchards.

Jefferson was also fascinated by the weather. He rose with the sun and immediately checked the outdoor temperature, which he calculated to be consistently coldest at dawn. At about 4:00 p.m., the hottest part of the day, by his measurements, he took a second reading. He also noted levels of precipitation and the direction and speed of the wind, recording them all in pencil in a fanlike notebook made of thin slips of ivory, which he carried in his pocket constantly. Later he would copy all of his readings and other observations related to a host of subjects into permanent record books. It was easy to erase the pencil markings from the ivory pages, so Jefferson was able to reuse his notebook like a slate blackboard. He hoped his recordings would become part of a nation meteorological database; today his weather memorandum book that dates from 1776 to 1820 is part of the permanent collection of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

His design and furnishings for Monticello showed Jefferson to be one of the most talented men to gain national prominence. He had both inherited and married into sizable estates that included many slaves, affording him the land, manpower, and freedom to explore his remarkably broad interests and gifts. "Determined to never be idle," he once wrote to his 11-year-old daughter, "It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing." To the end of his days, Jefferson pursued knowledge, especially of scientific and agricultural matters, that would benefit the new republic of America.

During his 5-year diplomatic mission in Europe, under President George Washington and later as Benjamin Franklin's successor in the role of American minister to France. He spent a lot of time with painters and sculptors, and was able to closely examine European architectural styles. After his return he was appointed secretary of state, a post that he held for four years. In 1793, he went home with plans to modify Monticello's design.

Jefferson set about to double the size of his home and to remodel its interior. The house grew from two stories to three, but to all outward appearances it looked to be compressed into a single towering story, the style of the day in Paris.

Jefferson served as the vice president from 1797 to 1801 and as the nations President from 1801 to 1809. During his time in office and throughout his retirement, he was consumed by the effort to ward off bankruptcy, for a substantial cloud of debt hung over him. He managed only to postpone the inevitable.

Jefferson's heirs faced debts of $107,000 and were forced to sell his property, books, and paintings at several public auctions following his death in 1826. Monticello became a bargaining chip in a complex estate dispute. Shortly after the Civil War, the home's tenant-overseer was known to be charging visitors 25 cents a tour.

Along with his penchant for collecting. Jefferson also was an inveterate tinker in an age of rapid progress in engineering and scientific innovation. One example of his predisposition for efficiency is the mechanism for the double doors in the parlor: push one of the doors and a chain hidden beneath the floorboards causes the other to open at the same time, Jefferson designed a large clock that is connected to a Chinese gong on the roof. The timepiece, which hangs above the arched entry doors, was wound once a week on Sundays and powered by twin sets of suspended cannonball weights that were raised on pulleys to near ceiling level. The weights slowly descended all week and then sank through openings in the floor to the cellar, from which they were regularly hoisted for their weekly rewinding. This clock still keeps the accurate day of the week and time of day.

While entertaining guests in his formal dining room, Jefferson preferred as few intrusions by his slave servants as possible. To accomplish this, he installed panel doors on either side of the mantel that gave access to dumbwaiters, which could be loaded with wine from the cellar. On the opposite side of the room, another cabinet door swivels open to reveal a lazy Susan with several shelves. Slaves placed dishes of food on the shelves and rotated them to the butler in the dining room.

You can also take a look at Jefferson's copying machine, a polygraph often mistakenly thought to be of his own design. The device held two sheets of paper and connected pens, allowing the writer to make file copies of all his written documents. Credited with penning some 20,000 letters during his lifetime, Jefferson was enamored of the machine, calling it "the finest invention of the present age."

Jefferson, who read in seven languages, once said that he cold never live without books, and almost every house or office he occupied is designed to accommodate them. At Monticello, he devoted two rooms and part of a third to his precious volumes, a collection so vast that when he sold it to the government in 1815, it became the nucleus of the Library of Congress. Immediately after Jefferson relinquished his books he began to rebuild his library; a few of those volumes are still at the house.

Introduced to alcove beds in France, Jefferson admired their space-saving qualities and used them in almost every bedroom in his house. His own bedroom contained a unique adaptation: an open-sided space was built into the wall between this bedroom and study so that he could climb into or out of bed on the right side for his study, or the left side for his bedroom.

The author of the Declaration of Independence died in this bed on the 50th anniversary of the document's signing. He had roused himself from unconsciousness repeatedly that day to inquire, "Is it the Fourth?" Assured that the day had arrived, the 83-year-old champion of liberty breathed his last-just hours before his friend John Adams died.

The pictures I have included are just of the outside of Jefferson's home. You are not allowed to take pictures inside his home. The first picture is of Monticello itself. The second picture is just part of the garden. They still grow vegetables and flowers today that Jefferson imported from Europe. The third picture is of the Jefferson cemetery. The Jefferson cemetery is still in use by the descendents of Thomas Jefferson.