Monticello Soup

Once I finished writing the Monticello post, I had some "leftovers." So, Monticello soup.

Not only did Thomas Jefferson design (and, after seeing European and classical architecture,) redesign Monticello himself, he built in a few ingenious things to make life easier. A hideaway bed. A revolving clothes horse with 48 arms, sort of like a spiral dry cleaner's rack hung vertically. A revolving book stand for five open books at a time, which folds up into a cube for storage.

And the first dome in America. Although beautiful and stately, the room under the dome proved to be impractical as a ladies' drawing room, its original purpose, and was rarely used. It is about 26 feet in diameter, with eight circular windows and a skylight, and it is difficult to heat in winter or cool in summer.

With his son-in-law the plantation manager, Jefferson invented the mouldboard plow for the hilly ground of Albemarle County. As you plow a furrow, the topsoil lifts up and over the mouldboard, falling in a strip to one side only. The mouldboard plow made faster work of plowing a field on a hill and left ridges deep enough to help drain off snowmelt and heavy winter rain.

Jefferson maintained experimental gardens in an effort to determine which fruit and vegetables were best grown in the Virginia climate. During his time in Paris, he shipped European plants to Monticello and American plants to Paris. And he both collected and distributed seeds from friends and neighbors in America, the Lewis and Clark expedition, and European gardeners as well.

Most of Monticello was in cultivation. Jefferson grew fruit, vegetables, and flowers for the main house and cash crops, tobacco and later wheat, to enable the purchase of other goods. However, the plantation was not successful, in part because of debt inherited from his wife's family, in part due to crop failure, and Jefferson died in debt.

Monticello

In 1764, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) turned 21 and came into his inheritance of 5,000 acres in Albermarle County, Virginia, his father having died about seven years earlier. Jefferson first used the name Monticello in a garden-book entry of 1767 and, in 1768, he cleared and leveled the 850-ft peak called Monticello ("Little Mountain" in Italian) on his property.

By this time, Jefferson's library included Andrea Palladio's 1570 I Quattro Libri dell' Architettura (Four Books of Architecture), which showed plans for villas based on classical Roman plans, James Gibbs's 1732 Rules for Drawing, and an Italian-English dictionary. From his studies of these (and other) works, Jefferson, acting as his own architect, designed and drew up plans for Monticello.

Now the Venetian Renaissance architect Palladio (1508-1580) had studied Vitruvius (ca. 80-15 BCE), the Roman architect and author of De architectura (Ten Books of Architecture), whose text and illustrations were both lost during the first collapse of European civilization in the fourth century CE. Vitruvius's text was rediscovered in a monastery library in the early Renaissance, 1414, the first illustrated version was published in 1511, and Palladio himself provided illustrations for a later version.

On the plantation, Jefferson grew tobacco and mixed crops and later changed over to wheat. The property comprised the house, a nailery and other outbuildings, slave quarters, gardens for flowers and produce, and experimental gardens. Around one-hundred-and-fifty slaves served in the house, on the grounds, and in the fields.

Jefferson brought his wife Martha home to Monticello in 1772. They enjoyed ten years of happy marriage and parented six children, two of whom survived to adulthood. His wife died in 1782, four months after the birth of her last child. At this time, the original Monticello was mostly complete.

Two years after the death of his wife, in 1784, Jefferson left Monticello and took a diplomatic post in Paris. While in Europe, Jefferson continued his amateur study of classical architecture and took note of the current trends as well.

Jefferson returned to Monticello in 1789 and began remodeling it in 1796 on the site of the original house. This time he wanted to go beyond the drawings in the books and bring home the true Enlightenment spirit of Monticello in a way that the original building had not.  He continued remodeling Monticello throughout his presidency (1801-1809).

Monticello is illustrated on the reverse (back) of the United States nickel.

A floor plan of Monticello.

Image credit: Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Copyright © Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc. From the Monticello website at http://www.monticello.org.