Monticello

Last week, while on a business trip, I had a few extra hours before my flight out. Instead of spending it at the tiny airport in Charlottesville, VA, the group decided to check out Monticello.

Monticello was the home of Thomas Jefferson. While I knew some things about him, visiting his beloved homestead - even for just a couple of hours - gave me new insight into our third President.

Jefferson grew up in Virginia and and ever since he was a child, he wanted to live at Monticello. He inherited the land at age 14 when his father died. Work began on the house in 1768. Shortly after his wife Martha's death in 1782, Jefferson lived abroad as the US Minister to France for several years. While in France, he studied Palladian architecture and upon his return to Monticello, began a major reconstruction/renovation of the home.

While the home isn't an enormous mansion of Biltmore size, it's still a very beautiful large home. Jefferson put a lot of thought into every detail of the house. Instead of having several outside buildings for kitchen areas, a smokehouse, stables, etc., he incorporated many of these into the porticos that span out from under the house. This kept these buildings from taking away from the landscape and kept them cool as they were partially buried into the hill. The porticos form a U shape with the house in the center. At the entrance to the house, the porticos just look like two large L-shaped decks that span out from either side of the house. Jefferson installed metal roofing underneath the wood deck that caught rainwater and stored it in a cistern. He built an icehouse deep into the portico floor so that he could have ice for preserving foods in the middle of the hot Virginia summers.

I think that if we had lived in the same time and place, Jefferson and I could have been friends. Nevermind his views on the right to bear arms, limited government, individual rights, his advocation for the elimination of the national debt (even though he was quite indebted himself), etc. - the man was also into plants.

I don't just mean that he enjoyed a well-tended garden, but that he really loved studying and growing different types of plants. He not only had hundreds of cultivars of vegetables, flowers, and trees, but he also spent a lot of time developing new plants and finding the latest specimen available. This was not a time when you could open up a catalog and order your favorite hydrangea. Most of the plants we have available today either did not exist or had not been brought in from other areas of the world yet. Jefferson took detailed notes on all of his farming, gardening, and botany exploits. He even trained Lewis and Clark on how to take plant samples so that they wouldn't kill everything they tried to bring back from their expedition.

Upon Jefferson's death, his estate was in such deep debt that his surviving daughter had to sell the farmstead. Thankfully, its subsequent owners appreciated the importance of the home and kept it in rather good shape until it was bought in 1923 by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

I only got to spend about 20 minutes in the garden tour (this is what happens when you go somewhere without enough time, and are accompanied by three sweaty guys who'd rather go back to the AC than listen to some old guy praddle on about flowers in the 98-degree weather), but it was probably the most informative 20 minutes that I could have asked for. Poor Matt is now faced with the task of taking me back sometime so that we can do the whole tour (including the house, which I really wish I could've done).