Monticello - Charlottesville, Virginia - American Guide Series on Waymarking.com

MONTICELLO (open 8-5 daily; adm. 50¢), 1.2m., is approached by a private road that winds up through woods from a brick lodge. The notable mansion, on the leveled top of a ‘little mountain,’ looks across a wide lawn shaded by scattered treed to far horizons, embracing the crest of the Blue Ridge and many miles of Piedmont.

The red brick house with snow-white trim, roughly oval in plan and in a green frame of trees, is an example of Classical Revival design. To the southwest it presents a fine Roman Doric portico before the projecting end of a salon designed in the French manner. The room is topped by a large white-domed octagonal clerestory with circular windows. Behind a similar portico, the eastern and newer side has a low second story with half windows immediately above the lintels of the first floor windows, and a half story set back inconspicuously. The whole, tied together by a balustrade parapet and by a continuous Doric entablature, seems much smaller than it is. The house is at the center of a formal plan that embraces sunken and terrace-covered passages leading away from it on both sides to small temple like pavilions at the far ends of service quarters set in the hillside.

The interior is distinguished by beauty of woodwork and many evidences of Jefferson’s ingenuity. The large entrance hall opens, beneath a balcony, into the salon. Lateral halls lead to four chambers, to the dining room with monumentally proportioned arches over alcove, and to Jefferson’s study. Two steep staircases, hidden in closet like alcoves because the builder regarded stairs as unattractive architectural features, lead to low bedrooms above the high first floor and to a ‘ballroom’ in the cupola.

Jefferson loved a gadget and invented many clever devices still in use. At Monticello are dumb-waiters, disappearing beds, unusual lighting and ventilating arrangements, one of his duplicate-writing machines, the fore runner of the one-arm lunch chair, folding doors of the type now used in streetcars – all devised by the builder of Monticello, who attached a contrivance to a wheel of his carriage to record the revolutions. Over the entrance is an extraordinary clock with a series of weights and pulleys that are incongruous in the formal room.

Assimilating the Graeco-Roman designs of Palladio and using materials - even nails - made by his slaves on the spot, Jefferson began building with painstaking care from his own design in 1770 and by 1775 had completed the western part, including a two-tiered portico. In 1771 after Shadwell (see Tour 17a) burned, he moved into the first completed pavilion and a year later he brought his bride to it on horseback through a blizzard. Stimulated by what he saw on his European travels, he enlarged the house between 1796 and 1809 in a style even more Roman, making it an example of classical design adapted to its environment and uses. Jefferson was the leader in as purifying a movement in architecture as in government. His careful symmetrical arrangement, the drawing room with an octagonal bay and the emphasized white portico, had a far-reaching influence in developing the style of architecture now called Early Republican or Federal. The Marquis de Chastellux, visiting here as early as 1782, wrote later: ‘We may safely aver that Mr. Jefferson is the first American who has consulted the fine arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather.’ Though the house has great interest it is less satisfactory form an architectural point of view than others Jefferson designed.

During Jefferson’s last years Monticello was a mecca for all distinguished travelers, European and American. He often received 40 or 50 guests a day in spite of his love of quite study and contemplation, which he rarely achieved except at Poplar Forest (see Tour IIa).

Soon after Jefferson’s death in 1826 the house and estate were sold for his only surviving child, Mrs. Martha Jefferson Randolph. Much hospitality and generosity had helped to impoverish a ‘founding father’ who never indulged in speculation. Generally valued at more than $70,000 the house and remaining 552 acres were bought in 1831 in a depressed market for a tenth of that amount by a Mr. Barkley, who had newly come to the neighborhood, disliked Jefferson, and largely destroyed his gardens. When Barkley’s silk worm project failed after three years, there was a abortive movement by the Federal Government to buy the place as a National monument. Two hundred and eighteen acres and the house were bought for $2,500 and partly restored by Uriah Levy, who admired Jefferson. But after 1839 he turned it over to tenants and gradual ruin. The house was confiscated in 1861 and the furnishings were sold. After the war, however, Monticello was restored to Commodore Uriah Levy, who recovered some of the furniture and attempted to leave Jefferson’s house to the Nation or to the people of Virginia. His will having been broken, a nephew, Jefferson Levy, acquired full possession, restored the house, and enlarged the estate to about 2,000 acres. In 1923 he sold Monticello and 650 acres for $500,000, to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, successor to another association organized for the same purpose in 1912.