Monticello
Interesting facts
- Monticello is the only private home in the United States designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- A large clock face on the east wall has only an hour hand, which Jefferson considered precise enough for the people he enslaved.
- The dome room, reached only by a steep and very narrow staircase, was rarely used; it has been restored with Mars yellow walls and a green-and-black checkered floor.
- A wind plate in the ceiling of the east portico is connected to a weather vane on the roof, showing which way the wind is blowing.
- For all its grandeur, the house has only about 1,000 square metres of living space, and the dining table was set up only at mealtimes.
- Jefferson's second library, sold to Congress in 1815 after the British burned Washington, became the nucleus of the Library of Congress; Monticello's library holds books from his third.
- Before it appeared on the nickel, Monticello was pictured on the back of the two-dollar bill from 1928 until that note was discontinued in 1966.
- During the Civil War the Confederate government seized Monticello as enemy property and sold it to a Confederate officer; the Levy family recovered it after the war.
- Uriah P. Levy, who saved the house in 1834, was the first Jewish commodore in the US Navy, and his mother Rachel is buried at Monticello.
- Jefferson wrote his own epitaph for his grave on the estate, and it makes no mention of his having been President of the United States.
Why it is worth it
Monticello sits on the summit of a wooded hill in Virginia's Piedmont, and its name — Italian for "little mountain" — says exactly where Thomas Jefferson wanted to live: above the landscape, looking out over it. The third president of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence was also its architect, and he spent more than half a century designing, building, tearing down and rebuilding the house. The result is a brick villa crowned by an octagonal dome, one of the most personal pieces of architecture in America, and since 1987 a UNESCO World Heritage Site together with Jefferson's University of Virginia nearby.
Work on the first version began in 1768. After years in Paris as American minister to France, Jefferson came home with new ideas drawn from classical buildings and fashionable French houses, and from 1794 he remodelled the house in a Neoclassical manner rooted in the work of Andrea Palladio. He more than doubled its size, replaced a full upper storey with a mezzanine so that the house reads as a single-storey villa from the west, and placed the dome over the west front. Inside are his own inventions: beds set into alcoves, dumbwaiters built into the dining-room fireplace, a great clock in the entrance hall, and an entrance hall that served as a small museum of his scientific interests, today showing recreations of objects gathered by the Lewis and Clark expedition. Aligned windows and the high central hall were planned to pull cooling air through the rooms. Jefferson kept working on the house until his death in 1826, and he is buried in the family cemetery on the grounds.
Monticello was also a plantation of some 5,000 acres worked by enslaved people. Along Mulberry Row, a lane beside the house, stood their quarters together with workshops such as a nailery where boys made nails. Archaeology there and the restoration of the room associated with Sally Hemings, uncovered in 2017, now tell their side of the story alongside Jefferson's. After his death the indebted estate was sold; Uriah P. Levy, a US Navy commodore who admired Jefferson, bought it in 1834 and saved it from ruin, and his nephew Jefferson Monroe Levy continued that care before selling it in 1923 to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs it as a house museum. An image of the house has appeared on the reverse of the US nickel almost every year since 1938.
Getting there
Monticello stands about 3 km from Charlottesville, Virginia, in the hills near Virginia State Route 53. The nearest airport is Charlottesville–Albemarle Airport (CHO), about 14 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Monticello was the primary residence and plantation of Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father, author of the Declaration of Independence, and the third president of the United States. Jefferson began designing Monticello after inheriting land from his father at the age of 14. Located just outside Charlottesville, Virginia, in the Piedmont region, the plantation was originally 5,000 acres (20 km2), with Jefferson using the forced labor of enslaved black people for extensive cultivation of tobacco and mixed crops, later shifting from tobacco cultivation to wheat in response to changing markets. Due to its architectural and historic significance, the property has been designated a National Historic Landmark. In 1987, Monticello and the nearby University of Virginia, also designed by Jefferson, were together designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The United States nickel has featured a depiction of Monticello on its reverse every year since 1938 with the exception of 2004–05.
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