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A house on a little mountain
Monticello, Italian for “little mountain”, stands on an 850-foot summit in the Southwest Mountains near Charlottesville. Thomas Jefferson began building in 1768 and, from 1794, rebuilt the house along neoclassical lines inspired by Andrea Palladio, crowning it with an octagonal dome above the west front. He worked on it for the rest of his life.
A plantation of enslaved people
Monticello was a plantation, and its fields, workshops and household depended on enslaved people. Mulberry Row, a street of workshops and dwellings beside the house, was home to many of them. In 1774 the Jeffersons inherited 135 enslaved people from the estate of Martha Jefferson’s father, John Wayles, among them the Hemings family. Jefferson freed two men during his lifetime and five in his will, all members of the Hemings family.
Debt, sale and a museum
Jefferson died at Monticello on 4 July 1826 and is buried in the family graveyard. The estate was heavily in debt and was sold out of the family in 1831. The house passed through private owners until the Thomas Jefferson Foundation bought it in 1923; it is now a house museum and, with the University of Virginia, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
