Residence 1
📍12601 River Road, Richmond, VA 23238, USA
1752 – 1760“My father Peter moved our family to Tuckahoe in 1752 when I was three years old, having promised his dying friend William Randolph he would raise the Randolph children alongside his own. The great house at Tuckahoe was the first grand architecture I knew: an H-shaped plantation house with a schoolroom in the east wing where a Scottish tutor gave me Latin and Greek before I was ten. Everything I later built at Monticello was a conversation with the proportions I first encountered here — the way a properly designed room makes its occupants feel both comfortable and significant. I left for home in 1760 when I was seventeen, carrying Latin, Greek, mathematics, and an understanding of what good architecture requires that no institution could have taught me. The education of a statesman is never formal — it happens in rooms like this one, quietly, before anyone knows what is being prepared.”
👍 LovedThe schoolroom in the east wing and the Randolph family library — the beginning of a lifetime's reading that shaped everything I later wrote
👎 DislikedThe distance from my own birthplace at Shadwell, and the sense of being a guest in someone else's house during the years when a boy most needs his own ground
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today
Residence 2
📍1050 Monticello Loop, Charlottesville, Virginia 22902, USA
1770 – 1826“I designed Monticello myself — began it in 1768 when I was twenty-five, kept redesigning it for the next forty years, and never quite finished it. The house on the little mountain above Charlottesville was the physical expression of everything I believed about architecture, agriculture, science, and the life of the mind. I grew grapes and vegetables and wheat and ran experiments in the garden. I had a library of nearly seven thousand books. I wrote the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia but I thought it through at Monticello, walking the terraces and the gardens, testing the arguments against the hills of Virginia. The contradiction at the heart of Monticello — that a man who wrote all men are created equal held over six hundred human beings in slavery on these grounds — is the contradiction at the heart of America itself.”
👍 LovedThe architecture I designed and kept perfecting. The garden as laboratory. The library that was the finest in America. The Virginia hills and their particular beauty.
👎 DislikedThe slavery on which Monticello depended — the moral contradiction I could not resolve and did not resolve. The debts that meant the estate had to be sold after my death. The gap between the ideals I wrote and the life I lived.
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today
Sources: Meacham, J. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (2012), Random House; Ellis, J. American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1997), Knopf
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