Monticello
Jefferson owned lots of land, including several plantations, most of which he inherited from his father. Americans like to think of this nation as a land of self-made men who can rise from nothing to build lives of hard-earned wealth, and to be sure, there were several men among the Founding Fathers who fit a version of that model. But Thomas Jefferson wasn't one of them. He started out wealthy, which is probably how he had the time and ability to figure out how to do all the other things he did.
One of those things he figured out was architecture, and one of the buildings he designed was his own home. The Monticello Plantation he inherited near Charlottesville was comprised of 5,000 acres centered around a pretty hill with a good view, so in 1769 at the age of 26, Jefferson started work designing and building his very own house. It was a labor of love he tinkered with for the rest of his life and never really finished, but it was done enough for him to start living there in 1772. This became the center of a vast holding of tobacco and other crops, though in later years shifting economies forced him to switch from tobacco to wheat.
The house itself started out with an Italian Renaissance style that shifted through a number of sometimes competing themes as time wore on and Jefferson kept fiddling. The effect, even now, works out to be a pretty place, but when you look close you can see that all the competing notions and architectural theories don't necessarily fit, and some of his fixes for things are the sort of thing I might have come up with. (Anybody who's seen my attempts at home repair knows this is not a compliment to anybody.) There's a funny thing with a closet, for instance, installed in a three-foot crawlspace in the attic above his bedroom that required a hole to be cut in the ceiling to accommodate a ladder, so getting dressed involved a lot of climbing and crawling. Jefferson was sort of a "jack of most trades, master of none" kind of guy, and by the standards of my own life, you might call him a bit of a redneck. There's no telling what the man might have accomplished if he'd had duct tape.
By other modern definitions, Jefferson was also a bit of a hoarder, and the house was full of all sorts of crap he collected over the years. The house passed through several hands between Jefferson's death and its current ownership, but the historical society has stuffed it with a ton of Jeffersonian junk that illustrates maybe a tenth of the junk he actually owned. They don't let you take pictures inside the house, though, so you'll just have to take my word for it.
Monticello
Jefferson owned lots of land, including several plantations, most of which he inherited from his father. Americans like to think of this nation as a land of self-made men who can rise from nothing to build lives of hard-earned wealth, and to be sure, there were several men among the Founding Fathers who fit a version of that model. But Thomas Jefferson wasn't one of them. He started out wealthy, which is probably how he had the time and ability to figure out how to do all the other things he did.
One of those things he figured out was architecture, and one of the buildings he designed was his own home. The Monticello Plantation he inherited near Charlottesville was comprised of 5,000 acres centered around a pretty hill with a good view, so in 1769 at the age of 26, Jefferson started work designing and building his very own house. It was a labor of love he tinkered with for the rest of his life and never really finished, but it was done enough for him to start living there in 1772. This became the center of a vast holding of tobacco and other crops, though in later years shifting economies forced him to switch from tobacco to wheat.
The house itself started out with an Italian Renaissance style that shifted through a number of sometimes competing themes as time wore on and Jefferson kept fiddling. The effect, even now, works out to be a pretty place, but when you look close you can see that all the competing notions and architectural theories don't necessarily fit, and some of his fixes for things are the sort of thing I might have come up with. (Anybody who's seen my attempts at home repair knows this is not a compliment to anybody.) There's a funny thing with a closet, for instance, installed in a three-foot crawlspace in the attic above his bedroom that required a hole to be cut in the ceiling to accommodate a ladder, so getting dressed involved a lot of climbing and crawling. Jefferson was sort of a "jack of most trades, master of none" kind of guy, and by the standards of my own life, you might call him a bit of a redneck. There's no telling what the man might have accomplished if he'd had duct tape.
By other modern definitions, Jefferson was also a bit of a hoarder, and the house was full of all sorts of crap he collected over the years. The house passed through several hands between Jefferson's death and its current ownership, but the historical society has stuffed it with a ton of Jeffersonian junk that illustrates maybe a tenth of the junk he actually owned. They don't let you take pictures inside the house, though, so you'll just have to take my word for it.