Monticello and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville
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How it came to be
Monticello is the house Thomas Jefferson (1743 to 1826), author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States, designed for himself; the name is Italian for little mountain. Work began in the late 1760s on a 5,000-acre plantation worked by some 150 enslaved people. Jefferson went to France in 1784, saw modern French architecture in Paris, and from 1794 to around the end of his presidency in 1809 rebuilt the house.
On 25 January 1819 Virginia chartered the University of Virginia, which Jefferson founded and for which he designed both the curriculum and the buildings. His Academical Village in Charlottesville, 8 km away, is planned around a library, the Rotunda, modelled on the Pantheon, rather than a church, with ten pavilions. The first classes met on 7 March 1825.
Jefferson died on 4 July 1826, and Monticello was sold in 1831. Uriah P. Levy bought it in 1834 and preserved it with his own money, and in 1923 a non-profit foundation acquired it for 500,000 dollars. The Rotunda was nearly destroyed by fire in 1895 and restored under the architect Stanford White. Both places were inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1987.
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