We popped over to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s little pad, near Charlottesville, VA, today. The visit started with the normal visit to the facility visitor center which is pretty spectacular since it is very impressive heavy-timber framed structures. At this place they quickly separated us from $25 a head to ride a shuttle up to the house, a tour of the downstairs portion of the place and unlimited wandering about in the basement and the grounds.
Jefferson himself designed the structure and the guy must have been a genius although he was also OCD and wrote everything down. He has extensive records of where everything was acquired and for how much, where plants were placed in the gardens, how many slaves he had and how much they cost and copies of every letter he wrote. He had a device he created that would write a copy of whatever he wrote to facilitate his anal-retentive tendencies.
The house itself is quite impressive and from the exterior looks pretty close to the depiction you see on the back of contemporary nickels. There is a clock mechanism over the front door that showed the time to folks inside the house displaying hours, minutes and seconds and showed the time to folks outside (slaves) in hours only. It is powered by falling weights that look like cannonballs but there might have been a bit of a design flaw. The weights fall a certain distance per day but the room wall height is insufficient to allow for a week of timekeeping so Tom cut holes in the foyer floor to allow the weights to descend into the basement in order to avoid winding the clocks more than once per week. There are clocks all over the house, all of which required weekly winding. Most of them seem to be running today so they must be well-built. There are records from Tom and others living at the time indicating he wound all the clocks once a week, although he may not have done much else since he had 200+ slaves and was busy being anal about listing everything.
There is a bunch of original and some re-created furniture throughout the house that is very impressive but uncomfortable looking. They wouldn’t let me lay down on Tom’s bed because it is 225 years old but I can tell you that if you got up on one side of the bed you would be in his study and if you got up on the other side you would be in his bedroom. The bed would also be short for me because Mr. Jefferson designed the bed for someone 74.5 inches tall (it is 75 inches long) and I’m a bit too tall. He had the only room with a private bath. There are other bathrooms in the building with an interior plumbing system which exited a lot closer to where the slaves lived than to where Tom slept. Still, most of the old houses we have visited in Virginia have outhouses so Monticello, at least in a sewer plumbing sense, was way ahead of it’s time.
We also wandered around in the gardens which are very beautiful and exceptionally well-tended. Of course they have every plant identified, just like in Jefferson’s time. The trees are all quite mature and cast big shady spots which was delightful since it was 92 degrees and the humidity seemed to leave everyone soggy. From the gardens you can wander down to Jefferson’s grave which is marked with an obelisk that is not quite as big as the Washington Monument but shaped about the same.
Tom was quite a whiz. He wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Amendment which separated church from state and ultimately became the first amendment to the Constitution in addition to establishing the University of Virginia. He was also a bit strange since he made a substantial stink about all men be created equal while holding some 200 slaves on his estate.
In any event, Monticello is a great place to visit and I certainly believe I got my $25 worth of experience. The house is spectacular, the tour was informative and given by a very knowledgeable docent, the gardens are beautiful and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation does a great job maintaining the joint. The only suggestion I could make is that if you are traveling to this great site, don’t take the interstate.