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Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello is one of the most beloved sites in America, drawing more than 300,000 visitors a year up a steep mountain road to enjoy majestic views of the Virginia Piedmont and house tours that can feel like stepping into its creator’s complicated mind.
But in 1775, it was a muddy construction site — and, as a guide told a tour group gathered on its front portico on a recent morning, a pretty good metaphor for the not-quite-born United States itself.
“Things were just getting started, and they weren’t going great,” the guide said. After a decade of escalating tensions between Britain and the colonists, a shooting war had broken out in Massachusetts. The Continental Congress formed an army, appointing an upstanding Virginian, George Washington, to lead it.
“Which, by the way,” the guide noted wryly, “was John Adams’s idea.”
Virginia may be a purple state these days, but the area around Monticello is still rock-ribbed Jefferson country. Heading south, you can follow Thomas Jefferson Parkway to Jefferson Vineyards. Go a few miles north, to downtown Charlottesville, and you hit “Mr. Jefferson’s university,” as some still reverentially call it.
But as the 250th anniversary of American independence approaches, his fellow founder and sometime nemesis is getting prominent billing up at Monticello, thanks to “Founding Friends, Founding Foes,” a new tour built around the fraught 50-year relationship between Jefferson and Adams.
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