On Friday, Joe and I drove south for 3 hours to visit Monticello. Yep, that's the building on the back of your nickels.
It turned out to be a moving experience, which I wasn't expecting. I've toured a lot of famous peoples' old houses and I'm usually distracted from their stories by the way the places are run. Also, I'm not very knowledgeable about Jefferson (although maybe knowing a lot about a place makes me more analytical about my experience in it).
Anyway, I got all teary in the Great Hall, and by the time the guide started talking about Jefferson's ideal for the separation of church and state, I was surreptitiously wiping tears from my face. There was something about the immediacy of the place, that Indian objects displayed in this hall had been collected at a moment when things might have gone differently...
... that Jefferson used his wealth and intelligence to bring Locke and Plutarch and Palladio to a farm that still feels like the middle of nowhere...
... that these bricks - made from clay found on the grounds - had been hand-formed by people whom this in-many-ways-admirable man kept enslaved.
The plants that Jefferson chose and cultivated for his garden are all labeled.
This vegetable garden stretches down the hillside in terraces.
This is the view from an enslaved person's cabin of the work areas under the house.
Jefferson's grave.
On the way back we stopped at UVa to see buildings Jefferson had designed there: the Rotunda and the Lawn, where lucky fourth-year students live with no bathrooms.
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