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Showing posts with label Charlottesville. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Charlottesville. Show all posts

Thursday, July 19, 2018

Visiting Thomas Jefferson's Monticello Home (Virginia) with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello Home (Virginia) with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget – Ruth Pennington Paget

My sister Kathleen came to visit Florence and me while Laurent was away on a cruise.  We went to visit Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello home outside Charlottesville, Virginia.

We took the tour.  The guide said he wanted to break with everything British including Georgian architecture.

Jefferson studied the Renaissance Italian architect Andrea Palladio’s approach to country villas and used them for inspiration in his Monticello home.

Monticello is Italian for “Little Mountain.”  The dome on Monticello was the first constructed in the United States.  The dome is modeled after the one used in Palladio’s La Rotunda Villa in Vicenza, Italy.

I liked the entry hall with its maps of Asia, Latin America, the United States, and Europe hanging on the walls.  Jefferson wanted to educate his guests as much as he wanted to entertain them.

The seven-day clock he invented stands in the hallway along with artifacts that Lewis and Clark brought back with them, including a buffalo skin with a war scene painted on it by Native Americans.  Florence said she liked the mastodon bones.

The “bedroom” with a bed between walls allowed Jefferson to either go into his study or go into his dressing room.  He invented a machine that would make copies of his letters as he wrote them.

Our tour guide said that Jefferson wrote 19,000 public and private letters.  He often complained that the ink in his pen would freeze during a Virginian winter.

Jefferson made the most interesting inventions in his dining room.  He had acquired a liking for wine during his stint as ambassador to France.  He liked wine served at cellar temperature like the French.

To make sure that his wine did not heat up during the blazing, hot Virginian summers, he installed a dumb waiter that went directly from his cellar to the dining room.

He also had a Lazy Susan door installed for serving food, so slaves would not interrupt the flow of conversation at the dinner table.

Jefferson came up with yet another idea for his dining room that people with snow-filled winters can appreciate; e installed double-paned windows on the north-side of his house.

I liked all the skylights in Monticello.  They lightened up the interior and made the house seem larger than it was.

Our guide continued, “Jefferson also put in mirrors on opposite sides of rooms so that they would appear larger.”

I was impressed by how clever Jefferson was.  The guide said, “Jefferson’s mind seemed to always be at work on home improvement.  He was also the first person in the United States to have parquet floors laid down at his home.”

According to our tour guide, “Jefferson took one of his slaves named Peter Hemmings to Paris with him when he was ambassador to that country.”

The guide went on to say, “Hemmings learned to cook French food very well.  Jefferson said he would give Hemmings his freedom, if he taught other slaves how to cook French food.”

Hemmings did just that and earned his freedom.

My sister Kathleen bought a video about Jefferson that said he wanted to be remembered for 3 things:

-writing the Declaration of Independence

-writing the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Religious Toleration Act

-designing the University of Virginia

(The living quarters at the University of Virginia use the same separation of living quarters between masters and slaves current at the time that Jefferson was ambassador to Paris. 

This same separation between living quarters for masters and servants can still be found in Parisian maid’s apartments in Haussman Apartment buildings that are so beloved and cherished today.)

Happy Touring!


By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books




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