In Thomas Jefferson’s boyhood imagination the hill had seemed to climb like Jack’s beanstalk to the infinite clouds. The view from his Father’s dooryard across the Rivanna registered each day through the clear lenses of his eyes upon the sensitive plate of his memory, and so upon his heart. As a lad he staged mental melodrama upon its symmetrical slopes and built an air-castle upon its summit. Every engagement of Caesar’s conquests, every adventure of the pious Aeneas found on Monticello a proper setting. If his schoolbooks had not been burned in the fire at Shadwell we might expect to find, on the margins of his Horace, a sketch of the castle of his dream, for Jefferson drew rather well and probably sketched just as well during study hour as any other boy of his age.
He was nineteen when his dream promised to materialize. That summer and the next, when he was at home for the long holiday, he would cross the Rivanna in his canoe and climb the slope to see how the workmen were getting on with the levelling for his castle. As the boy had grown towards manhood the hill no longer towered into the skies, but whatever the picture lost in size, it gained in rich associations. It was still his mountain: Monticello—“little mountain”—he called it. “Our own dear Monticello, where Nature has spread such a rich mantle under the eye, mountains, forests, rocks, rivers. There is a mountain there in the opposite direction of the afternoon’s sun, the valley between which and Monticello is five hundred feet deep.... How sublime to look down upon the workhouse of Nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet.”
In all weathers, under all trials, his heart took refuge on the hill. He was admitted to the bar in 1767, made headway in his profession, and was sent to the House of Burgesses, honors which only quickened his impatient accomplishment, and his desire for a home upon his mountain. In 1769 its plans were ready, and work began. Thirty years later it was finished. During those years he wrote his country’s bill of divorce from her harsh proprietor, and was nearly captured at Monticello by British raiders. Monticello saw him ride down the winding road as a Burgess, to ride up again as a member of the Continental Congress; honored him as Governor of Virginia, and waved him Godspeed as he left to succeed Benjamin Franklin as envoy to France; hailed him home as Washington’s secretary of state, and then reluctantly surrendered him to eight years in a new White House that stood in a sandy wilderness somewhere down on the banks of the Potomac. But when his active life was done, after he had not only written the Declaration of Independence but prosecuted it, added half a continent to its jurisdiction, and administered the doctrine that all men are created free and equal, he came back to the mountain of his memory to gaze down upon the workhouse of Nature.
“While it is too much to say,” writes Julian Street, “that one would recognize it as the house of the writer of the Declaration, it is not too much to say, that once one does know it, one can trace a clear affinity resulting from a common origin—an affinity much more apparent, by the way, than can be traced between the work of Michelangelo on St. Peter’s at Rome, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and in his ‘David.’
“The introductory paragraph to the Declaration ascends into the body of the document as gracefully as the wide flights of easy steps ascend to the doors of Monticello; the long and beautifully balanced paragraph which follows, building word upon word and sentence upon sentence into a central statement, has a form as definite and graceful as that of the finely proportioned house; the numbered paragraphs which follow, setting forth separate details, are like rooms within the house, and—I have just come upon the coincidence with a pleasant start such as might be felt by the discoverer of some complex and important cipher—as there are twenty-seven of the numbered paragraphs in the Declaration, so there are twenty-seven rooms in Monticello. Last of all there are two little phrases in the Declaration (the phrases stating that we shall hold our British brethren in future as we hold the rest of mankind—‘enemies in war; in peace, friends’), which I would liken to the small twin buildings, one of them Jefferson’s office, the other that of the overseer, which stand on either side of the lawn at Monticello, at some distance from the house.”
The house which inspired and witnessed the activities of so prominent a figure could hardly lack distinction, and this, of course, Monticello has. What is more, Monticello is a monument of technical architecture which attracts the eager attention of every student of American domestic building. The question they all ask, and the question that cannot be answered, is: “Where could this farmer-lawyer boy have got his expert training in architecture?” His library might have given us a clue, but it was burned at Shadwell in 1770. We know he felt this loss acutely, for, next to his house, Jefferson loved his books. He asked anxiously of their fate. An old slave answered: “All burnt, my young master, all burnt. But never mind, sir”—and his wrinkled face broke into a broad smile—“we saved your old fiddle!” The new house at Monticello was even then far enough along to take in his mother’s family, evicted by the fire. The building continued. It was slow work, on an extensive plan.
“Mr. Jefferson,” said one of Rochambeau’s aides later, “is the first American who has consulted the fine arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather.” With no continental travel for background, with only the meagre pictorial record of the period to draw upon, he somehow responded instantly to the simplicity and useful beauty of the classic, and translated it to his castle. By the Greeks, for example, it was thought improper that a roof should indicate anything but a glorification of the heavens; the idea that human feet might be walking on the upper side of a ceiling was sacrilege. This (and other more practical engineering reasons) dictated single-story buildings. Jefferson’s eye for balance caught the pictorial advantages of one-story construction, but he needed two stories for Monticello, and by his shrewd planning both the pure classic tradition and pure American comfort were reconciled.
At the end of a broad lawn, in full relief against the distant sky, stands a red brick house with a clean, tall portico. The four gleaming pillars stand guard like peace-time sentinels. A white balustrade runs along the eaves of the building, tempering the irregularities in the roof except where the smooth curve of a dome rises above the center. The feeling is classic, and so suggests a single story, and the length of the lofty windows flanking the portico seems to confirm the impression that a single frame has been carried the full height of the house. Closer examination, however, of the irregularities just remarked in the roof reveals them as the gabled windows of an upper story. In cold, unprofessional analysis, the compromise sounds thoroughly impractical. Just the contrary is true, for Jefferson took up every challenging problem with enthusiasm, and applied to its solution a sure sense of balance and a hearty appetite for detail.
Indoors the one-story tradition is quite as respectfully acknowledged, and as cleverly evaded. The entrance hall is a lofty room of great dignity, almost so good that a job-lot of Victorian furniture has not damaged its appearance, and unquestionably so good that even the most critical architectural eye will not take offense at a balcony which travels three of its sides. There is the balcony, but where, inquires your classic eye, are the stairs? Concealed in a passage, where they cannot break the form of the hall from which visitors are to gain their first impression of the interior.
If the visitor in Jefferson’s day went further, as his uniform hospitality required, he may have noticed as he passed to the drawing-room that the portal between the two rooms had two pairs of doors. There was a definite reason for them: the wall must be heavy to support the octagon in which the drawing-room was situated, and over which rose the dome. A single pair of doors would have made an ugly recess in either room. Two sets of doors finished both rooms correctly, but presented just twice as many nice problems of treatment. So the first set was made of heavily paneled wood, and might be folded back into an invisible pocket in the passage; the second set was a pair of light casements, and if the visitor were to press a spring on either one, both would close by a mechanism concealed overhead.