Monticello - Home of Thomas Jefferson

This is Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, and oh what a home!  You cannot see the majority of the house from the front.  The house was also really changed during the life of Thomas Jefferson.  Jefferson spent a few years in France and came home with architectural ideas and really changed his house.  He was also an inventor and had some cool ideas applied in the house.  He also had huge gardens and over 330 varieties of some 99 species of vegetables and herbs.

Here's the back of the house.  Now I included this photo because the house is not just the bump behind my head but includes the walkways to the side of the house and down to the small rooms on both sides.  The reason it includes the walkways is because there are rooms under those pathways.  Yep, the house is like a giant upside down "U."  Some of the storage rooms, kitchen, slave quarters and privies are all under the walkways.

Yep, me and Jefferson...and he was a bit taller than me.

Here's one of those walkways from the house and so under the walkway is another hall and lead to storage rooms and slave quarters.  Another neat thing about these walkways was the way they were constructed.  The top wooden pieces allowed rain water to drain through them into a ribbed portion that gathered the rain and sent in down gutters and then was collected.  All of was one of Jefferson's inventions/ideas.

Here's the view of the rooms under the walkways...see the railing above.  This side contained a kitchen, the cook's room, the smokehouse (another really cool invention), a couple slave quarters, a dairy and the south pavilion cellar.

And then there are the gardens.  As I said above, Jefferson had gardens and grew many varieties of plants.  The two-acre garden included 24 growing beds.  He also had a six-acre orchard for all his fruit trees and berries.

Do you see how Monticello was up on a hill and overlooked so much?  On beautiful days you can see for miles and miles.  It's very lovely.

The only other hill in the area is the one in this picture.  SM and I walked through the whole garden trying to identify all the veggies and herbs.  In 1811 Jefferson said "No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden."  I agree...I love growing plants.

Here's a look at some grapes, a few fruit trees and some berries of some kind.

Jefferson was buried on the property along with a lot of family members.  Here's the family cemetery.

Here's the head stone for Thomas Jefferson and his wife, Martha.

Yep, that's me.  I was checking out my foot.  It was bothering me as we were hiking around.  I found a small blister, which didn't surprise me since I ran the Charlottesville Half Marathon earlier that morning.  That's when I usually get blisters.  If my sock rubs wrong I get a blister.

SM and I loved our trip to Monticello and learning more about Thomas Jefferson.  After drafting/writing the Declaration of Independence, he spent the next 33 years in public life, serving as a delegate to the Virginia General Assembly and to Congress, as governor of Virginia, minister to France, secretary of state, vice president, and president from 1801 to 1809.  In his retirement he founded and designed the University of Virginia.