A blip for the Distracted Hausfrau

Today is our 50th wedding anniversary...a wonderful day that we spent in Virginia, touring Thomas Jefferson's home at Monticello, enjoying lunch at Michie's Tavern, and wandering for a bit on the beautiful campus of the University of Virginia. Monticello is an amazing estate. Please take time for a visit if you are ever in Virginia. Along with the founding of UVA, it is one of Jefferson's crowning achievements. He was able to sit with a telescope at his hilltop home and observe the construction of the Rotunda several miles away at the University.

For some time now, I have been an admirer of DH's famous graves series. So here is a famous grave for DH. This very ornate grave began with an agreement between a young Thomas Jefferson and his friend Dabney Carr, schoolmates who agreed that they would be buried together beneath a huge oak tree on this site. The tree is no longer there, but their graves are. Carr was buried first. Jefferson didn't die until more than 50 years later on July 4,1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the writing of the Declaration of Independence. Their graves are two of many at this site that was laid out by Jefferson as his family burying ground.

The monument you see here is not the original designed by Jefferson. It was erected by the United States in 1883, and its base covers the graves of Jefferson, his wife Martha, their two daughters, and Governor Thomas Mann Randolph, his son-in-law. The graveyard is the property of Jefferson's descendants, who may still be buried there today. The most recent headstone we saw was only two or three years old. The monument reads, "Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia." According to Jefferson, those were his three greatest achievements, with no mention of being the third president of the United States or ambassador to France. Jefferson had a very low opinion of what he called "the hated occupations of politics."

What an interesting day we have had here in Virginia. I hope we can come back again soon; there is so much to see and learn.