Monticello

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorCollege, Undergraduate November 2001

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Contents In May of 1768, Thomas Jefferson started to level out the land in which he had inherited from his father, Peter Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson intended to build his home on the gentle top of a 987 foot-high mountain in Albermarle, Virginia. He called this mountain Monticello, which means "little mountain"� in old Italian.

Thomas Jefferson, the self-taught architect, designed Monticello after ancient and Renaissance models and particularly after the work of Andrea Palladio, an Italian architect. In the location, a frontier mountaintop, and in design, a Renaissance villa, intentionally it was a cry from the other American homes of its day.

The First Monticello The work on Monticello was largely completed in 1782. The first floor of the house featured a parlor, a bedroom, a dining room, and a drawing room. As the house neared completion, Jefferson's wife died, as he wrote, leaving him with "a blank which I had not the spirits to fill up"�( Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc.

monticello.org/jefferson/parlor/dig.html).

As of 1784, Thomas Jefferson was appointed to diplomatic service in France. While he was there, he was a keen observer of the architecture. The Hôtel de Salm strongly influenced the redesign for Monticello.

Then, as early as 1790, Thomas Jefferson began planning revisions for Monticello, based partly on what he had observed in France. In 1796, the walls of the original home were knocked down to make room for an expansion that would then double the floorplan of the house. This new plan called for a hallway that would connect the older rooms of the house to a new set of rooms on the east. The year Jefferson retired from Presidency is the year in which Monticello was largely completed, in 1809.

The Second Monticello Among one of the many French elements in which Jefferson...