Monticello tries out an addition Thomas Jefferson’s famous home debuts a visitor center to manage, entertain crowds Founding Father also introduced us

Call it a visitor center, call it an educational center, call it “The 21st-Century Gateway to Monticello,” but the real purpose of the new building at Thomas Jefferson’s plantation is crowd control. 

Like the Mount Vernon visitor center that opened in 2006, the new Thomas Jefferson Visitor Center is basically a pressure valve, meant to prevent great floods of people from overwhelming the small and fragile 18th-century house it serves. The success of this addition to “the mountain,” the achingly beautiful Albemarle County hilltop on which Jefferson designed one of this country’s most innovative and elegant homes, is how well it hides its essential purpose.


ALL THE PARTS WORK WELL


Like all new visitor centers, the addition to Monticello, designed by Ayers/Saint/Gross Architects + Planners of Baltimore, is a multipurpose structure. It educates, it entertains, it feeds the mind and the body (at a new cafe) and of course you can shop for Jeffersonian paraphernalia. But the success of the structure lies in its careful separation of functions and the freedom it gives the visitor to avoid any or all of them while waiting for a coveted, timed entry to the old house up the hill.

It is a collection of five distinct but connected rectangular buildings, erected around a pleasant courtyard that serves as a roof over the lower level of the whole complex. It’s in the same spot as the old ticket booths and restrooms built in 1972, well below and out of sight of the house. After a decade of planning and more than two years of construction, the new facility consolidates services and amenities that were previously spread out, including a small exhibition space operated by Monticello since the early 1980s that was located even farther down the mountain near Interstate 64.


VISITORS FREE TO CHOOSE


The new facility is much more rational and convenient than the old, dispersed arrangement, and the free clustering of its parts – ticket booth, movie theater, gift shop, exhibition hall, cafe – is a welcome departure from the annoyingly linear regimentation of similar facilities, such as the one at Mount Vernon, where the building almost obligates you to pass through its spaces in designated order.

You can set your own agenda at Monticello. The classrooms and interactive children’s room are set apart from the main courtyard, which is a sensible way to keep adult areas a little more calm and reflective. The cafe is off by itself at one of end of the center, well lit by natural light, with outdoor seating that will be inviting on clement days. But if your primary interest is Jefferson’s house, you can buy a ticket at one end of the facility and pass diagonally through the courtyard to the stairs that lead to the bus stop. Yes, it’s a nuisance to have to take a shuttle bus, but unless demand to see Jefferson’s house changes in better proportion to the relatively modest size and delicacy of the building, there’s no avoiding some draconian crowd control.


A FUNCTIONAL PLACE


The $43 million building is a modest structure compared with the $110 million center built at Mount Vernon. It is not necessarily beautiful to look at, in a purely architectural sense. The design firm isn’t trying to make any bold statements. But it is scrupulous about not making any mistakes.

Consider all the possible pitfalls. A bold, contemporary building might overwhelm Jefferson’s house. But a timid or apologetic effort would inevitably look and feel cheap. Something made of brick, in the style of Monticello, would instantly be labeled fake and derivative. But any sharp contrast of styles would be out of context.

And where do you put it? Underground visitor centers haven’t turned out to be a successful strategy because they’re never invisible, and they leave visitors blinking like moles as they pass from contemporary, subterranean spaces to historical, naturally lit ones. But if a center is above ground, how do you keep it from ruining the existing landscape – as integral to Monticello as the house itself?

The architects have successfully sidestepped these fundamental problems and opted, in each case, for a “least bad” alternative. Much of the building is below ground, but, because they integrated it into the natural slope of the mountain, it doesn’t feel dark or buried. The structure isn’t slavishly historical – none of the red brick or white columns of Monticello itself – but by using wood and fieldstone, they have made a building that is materially connected to the time of Jefferson. 


Montalto is the high peak above Thomas Jefferson’s little mountain of Monticello. From this lofty perch, you can see Jefferson’s life shaped in the land. Far to the right, in the valley, there’s the third president’s boyhood home, Shadwell.

As you gaze on Monticello itself, 400 feet below and almost a mile distant, you observe the brick Palladian villa. This is not the predominant element. That prize goes to the vegetable garden, a 1,000-foot-long terrace, 80 feet wide, suggesting Noah’s ark perched post-flood on Mount Ararat.

Home vegetable gardening is trendy again and got a huge boost last month when first lady Michelle Obama led a crew of fifth-graders in breaking ground on a White House plot on the South Lawn. The President’s House, as Jefferson knew it when he was the occupant, was too raw and muddy for serious gardening in the first decade of the 19th century. Instead, he arranged the construction of his vegetable garden above Charlottesville, Va., so that it would be ready for his long and fertile retirement.

“The notion of gardening as a food source, as recreation and as salvation for the future are all legacies we can learn from Thomas Jefferson,” says Peter Hatch, director of gardens and grounds at Monticello since 1977. Hatch, a lyrical scholar of Jefferson the gardener, sees a figure who would be heartily embraced by the food activists who encouraged the Obamas to plant a garden.

Jefferson relied on slaves to build and maintain the garden, but he took an active and inquisitive role in choosing the plants and doing much of the sowing. His garden diary and related correspondence reveal a practical gardener who understood the holistic concepts of organic gardening that successive generations have had to relearn.

Hatch, 59, also says Jefferson invented the style of vegetable gardening we know today, and the idea of this garden as an ark is perhaps not so far-fetched, though Hatch thinks of it more as an Ellis Island. This two-acre plateau, rebuilt in the early 1980s, quickly became a showcase for vegetables from around the world.

To see Jefferson as a gardening revolutionary as well as a political one, Hatch says, you have to look at what his contemporaries were growing. At other Virginia plantations, the model was of the English or French walled kitchen garden, with hot frames and formal paths. The notion was of a garden that was not only highly formal and laborious but designed to raise marginal plants in cool climes. 

Jefferson championed the tomato, which didn’t take off until the first two decades of the 19th century (Europeans thought it poisonous and possibly, as Hatch conjectures, too sensual a fruit). He added to the summer garden such heat lovers as crowder peas, peanuts, sweet potatoes, peppers, lima beans, eggplant, asparagus and okra. 

Jefferson wrote freely of the therapeutic value of gardening. His gardening activity increased during periods of stress, including the death of his daughter, Maria, and during the Aaron Burr treason trial. Jefferson made no secret of his weariness of public life while he was still in the White House.

After he returned to Monticello, he wrote that “I am constantly in my garden, as exclusively employed out of doors as I was within doors in Washington, and I find myself infinitely happier in my new mode of life.” 
You’ll find Monticello just outside Charlottesville, Va, approximately 125 miles southwest of Washington, D.C. The site’s new Thomas Jefferson Visitor Center and Smith Education Center had a grand opening Wednesday.