Throughout the building there were ingenious touches which disclosed beneath their first impression of simple luxurious comfort the patient scheming of the builder. The drawing-room was octagonal in order that five windows might frame clear vistas in as many directions across the sweeping valleys to the horizon. The floor there is of squares of cherry wood, each with a liberal border of contrasting beech; both woods were laid only after Jefferson had made painstaking experiment in the color and in the wearing and joining qualities of various kinds of flooring. The same note of formality which one feels in the Pringle house of Charleston as he passes from room to room through heavily pedimented doorways is sounded at Monticello; but where Miles Brewton, in his Charleston house, held strictly to the “egg-and-dart” of the classic mode, Thomas Jefferson embellished the friezes above the doors of his drawing-room with a motive of tomahawks, scalping knives and rosettes! He feared that the dining-room, with only two southerly windows for ventilation, might become close toward the end of a long meal, so he gave a slight dome-like concavity to the ceiling, and at its focal center concealed under a grille the intake of a ventilator which leads up through the roof. He built a recess for the sideboard with the double effect of preserving the lines of the apartment and of displaying a handsome piece of furniture to its best advantage. An exquisite Adam mantel, with Wedgwood panels, stands between two of the windows, and you would never guess that in one of its sides is a door, and behind that door a dumb-waiter leading from the service rooms below. He wanted his body-servant’s room conveniently near his own, so a staircase to the valet’s quarters ascends through a spacious closet off the master’s chamber. None of the liaison between art and artifice would be remarkable today, perhaps. There are modern houses as honestly built as men of taste can plan and men of wealth can buy, to match Touraine for splendor, Italy for gilt, a highly organized railway terminal for convenience and Sybaris for comfort. But given the workmanship, the materials and the engineering of any period in our domestic architecture, Monticello challenges them all to show a better plan.

Long balustraded walks reach out to right and left from the house. Someone has likened them to two friendly outstretched arms, holding in each hand not a jewel, but a dainty summer-house. They are more than decorative promenades—each is the roof of a subterranean arcade, passing from the main building to the servants’ quarters. All of the strictly domestic affairs were in the cellar-story, made habitable by the fact that it was just a step down the hillside, and made by no means the least interesting portion of the building by further evidence of Jefferson’s genius. It is a veritable catacomb. He built there a kitchen ventilated by long ducts which carried cooking odors to distant outlets; he built cisterns, a large carriage court, cold-rooms, bins for fruits, and wood, and cider; servants’ quarters so placed that they were cool in summer and warm in winter. Like Mount Vernon, and every other colonial estate of any size, Monticello was a self-maintaining establishment, which supported the labor of several trades. But the tailor-shop, the distillery, the smithy, the dye-house, the cobblery, the weaver’s shop—all were set apart from the main house and concealed from the general eye. Later architects thought enough of the treatment of the arcade passages to the servants’ quarters to copy them for the subterranean barracks at Fortress Monroe.

One wonders where Thomas Jefferson found the time for all this labor and supervision. The answer must be that his house was his one consuming avocation. It is almost a truism that the men upon whom are made the heaviest demands find time to invite the greatest number of demands. As Roosevelt loved his natural history, and made affectionate excursions into botany, so Jefferson knew every tree and shrub on his estate, and watched over it. Each week during his presidency a letter was despatched from the White House to Captain Bacon, his overseer in charge, directing transplanting, grading, repairs, improvements. Many of the workmen on the estate were men whom he himself had trained in their crafts. Some were slaves, whom he later freed to practise the trades he had given them. Before he had stone cut and measured for the building he tested the stone; he weathered various woods; he made experiments in brick-laying which in some cases led him to strange conclusions, but which, like everything else he undertook about the building, had practical reasoning behind them. And yet, during all the patient hours he spent in drafting and directing, the miles he walked in surveying and landscaping, he never let the cloud of details eclipse the artist’s star.

Jefferson has been much idolized for his directness, his logic, his practicality. He undoubtedly gave the country what today would be termed “a good business administration.” It is tempting to leave him to posterity with that reputation, and with the Louisiana Purchase as its brightest testimonial, the shrewdest real estate deal in our history. But Monticello is so obviously the product of an artist and a scholar that we learn with no hint of damage to his commoner reputation that the man who had spent his life upon this estate had also spent much more money than he possessed; that his generosity approached extravagance; that his library of some seven thousand volumes, the best then in America, was sold after his death to the government (to replace the library the British destroyed at Washington in 1814) because it had to be sold to meet his debts; and that Monticello itself finally passed out of the hands of his family. With Jefferson gone Monticello could never be wholly itself again. It must stand always as the finest exposition of the heart of the artist who conceived the plan for the University of Virginia at Monticello’s skirts, who found when he visited Nîmes a Roman Temple which so fascinated him that he said the peasants thought him a mad Englishman contemplating suicide in its ruins, who copied that same temple for the Capitol of Richmond, and who wrote to a Paris acquaintance: “Here I am gazing whole hours at the Maison Quarrée like a lover at his mistress.”

When Jefferson died he was buried on the estate. An army of human rodents came to see to his grave and to nibble away most of the memorial shaft, and it was only through the persistent efforts of his grand-daughter, Miss Randolph, that the United States stepped in and restored it. Meanwhile the estate had been sold under questionable circumstances to a Captain Uriah Levy. In justice to him be it said that he felt the responsibility of his charge, and bequeathed it at his death to the people of the United States. But the Supreme Court decreed that this definition was too vague, and after a prolonged debate among Levy’s heirs, his nephew, Jefferson Levy, acquired for $10,500 the title to the buildings and 218 acres of the little mountain.

Sporadic efforts have been made to buy the estate and rescue it from the casual upkeep which is carrying Monticello steadily towards the shadows of oblivion; one such movement, under the leadership of Mrs. Martin W. Littleton, bade fair to succeed, and there were patriotic women ready to assume its care as they have so admirably done at Mount Vernon. The Governor of Virginia is silent on the subject, and the Wilson government, which owed more perhaps to Jefferson than to any other single preceptor, was otherwise engaged. With the return of peace the renewal of the project is, to say the least, appropriate. Whether it contains an appeal to the honor of citizenship in a nation in which all men are free and equal, is for its citizens—and one of them is the owner—to decide.

The Haunted House,
New Orleans

© D.McK

THE HAUNTED HOUSE