Qualla: Monticello

Monticello: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chapter 2.Question 11.Lori Elliott, CC BY-SA 4.0. Jefferson started drawing Monticello when he was a teenager and was still revising it when he died. Forty years - through a marriage and his wife's death, through Paris and the presidency, through the founding of a university five miles away - he kept tearing down what he had built and putting up something new. He doubled the floor plan, swapped a second story for a mezzanine, and crowned the whole thing with an octagonal cupola so he could stand under a dome on a Virginia mountain. The clock on the east portico has only an hour hand, because Jefferson believed an hour hand was accurate enough for the people he enslaved.

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Image: Chapter 2.Question 11.Lori Elliott | CC BY-SA 4.0

Monticello: The Little Mountain

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Teddypaperno, CC BY-SA 3.0. The name is Italian for little mountain, and Jefferson chose the spot for the view. Monticello sits on the summit of an 850-foot peak in the Southwest Mountains, three miles southeast of Charlottesville, looking out over the rolling Piedmont toward the Blue Ridge. Work on the fir...

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Image: Teddypaperno | CC BY-SA 3.0

Monticello: Mulberry Row

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sbuckley, CC BY-SA 3.0. The house at the top of the hill could not exist without the row of buildings just below it. Mulberry Row ran along a south-facing lane and held the working parts of the plantation: a nailery where enslaved boys made nails for sale, a joinery, a dairy, a washhouse, store houses, ...

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Image: Sbuckley | CC BY-SA 3.0

Monticello: Saving the House

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit photo by Tony Rice, CC BY-SA 3.0. When Jefferson died, he was deep in debt. His daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph sold Monticello in 1831 to a Charlottesville apothecary named James Turner Barclay for $7,500. Three years later Barclay sold it for $2,500 to Uriah P. Levy, the first Jewish commodore in the United ...

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Image: photo by Tony Rice | CC BY-SA 3.0

Monticello: An Essay in Architecture

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chapter 2.Question 11.Lori Elliott, CC BY-SA 4.0. Jefferson called Monticello his essay in architecture, and the house reads like one. The entrance hall doubled as a museum where he displayed Native American artifacts brought back by Lewis and Clark, on whose expedition he had staked the future of the country he led. He painted ...

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Image: Chapter 2.Question 11.Lori Elliott | CC BY-SA 4.0

Monticello: What Remains

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martin Falbisoner, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1987 UNESCO listed Monticello as a World Heritage Site - the only private home in the United States with that designation, paired with Jefferson's University of Virginia a few miles to the northwest. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation still runs the property, and recent decades h...

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Image: Martin Falbisoner | CC BY-SA 3.0