Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello: the Ultimate House and Garden Experience

When I am relaxing at the end of a day of working on Lewis and Clark matters, I often watch House and Garden TV, so you can imagine how thrilled I was to visit Monticello! There is an undeniable “rightness” to the place, if you accept the fact that slave labor was integral to its creation and maintenance. It is a fascinating place to visit. I will write more about the daily life of Monticello in my next blog.

Jefferson spent 40 years working on improvements at Monticello. It deserves its status as the only American house on the World Heritage List. Jefferson’s other architectural and conceptual masterpiece, the University of Virginia, is also on the list.  Both places are located in Charlottesville, Virginia on the eastern edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

I learned on this visit to Charlottesville that the Blue Ridge Mountains are part of “Old Africa.” The mountains are the remains of the old super continent before part of it split away and became Africa. They are beautiful mountains, and they are “blue.” Someday I hope to travel the Blue Ridge Parkway in a major way. 

I spent four consecutive days visiting Monticello while attending the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation annual meeting in early August, 2007. I was determined to get a chance to experience it, however briefly, in its entirety. On Friday, before the meeting, I toured the house on a public tour led by my friend Liz Tidwell, a Monticello tour guide, whom I had met at a previous Lewis and Trail Heritage Foundation meeting in St Louis. Liz afterwards gave me a private orientation tour of the grounds and outer buildings. The next day, on Saturday, I rented a car and returned in 100 degree heat to videotape the outer buildings and grounds. On Sunday morning, which was much cooler, I visited the gardens and gravesite with Claudia Crump, a teacher from New Albany, Indiana. On Monday, the members of the Trail Heritage Foundation had a private tour of the house and a reception on the lawn of Monticello. How lucky can you get? It was a once in a lifetime experience. Fortunately there are several books which I have ordered. I will review and blog about them in a later post and write about some I bought at the Monticello gift shop in the next post, “Jefferson at Home: Personal Reminscences.”

Jefferson was brilliant, and his home and Monticello reveal how sensibly and carefully he looked after the well being of all of its residents and the grounds of his estate. For a man who valued his family, books and learning, the finest of food and wine at his table, architecture and gardening, this was where his heart and soul were located. If you want to understand Jefferson, you have to visit Monticello. The Monticello Foundation does not allow photographs to be taken inside the house, so these photos are only taken outside. I will be working on my Monticello video as my first video offering on the Lewis and Clark Road Trips Photo and Video Trail Gallery, which launches in October, 2007.

Tour group viewing Monticello from the top of Montalto Mountain. The Foundation recently bought Montalto to save it from real estate development. A lovely old stone house on the property will become an educational center.

My friend Liz Tidwell, a Monticello tour guide, and a member of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation.

Jefferson’s porch, right outside of his study. His famous desk, with the revolving book holder, and the copying machine for copying his letters, and his telescope may be seen through the windows. The guided tour of the house takes you through this room and others on the ground floor.

The garden stretches for the length of 3 football fields, an 80 by 1,000 foot terrace, on the side of the mountain. Orchards and vineyards were placed below and to the west end of the terrace. The entire garden area was enclosed by a ten foot high fence.The gardens were to needed to feed both Jefferson’s family and his numerous visitors and guests.

The observatory was a favorite place for Jefferson to sit and read.

The outer buildings under the walkways extending from the house were work rooms, including the kitchen, smokehouse, stables, dairy, storage cellars, ice house and some slave quarters. The two walkways flanking the house enclose the flower gardens and lawn and lead to pavilion buildings at each end. Jefferson and his bride, Martha lived for the first years of their marriage in the South Pavilion, a 20 foot square building while Monticello was under construction. They lived in one room on the terrace level with a kitchen located on the ground level. Monticello was under construction in some form or another for almost forty years, from 1770 until Jefferson retired from the presidency of the United States in 1809.

Posted by on 08/25/2007 at 11:45 AM

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