Biography | Thomas Jefferson — He Moved Into This Mountain House in November 1770

People treat Monticello as the finished house on the hill.

What Jefferson first occupied here was smaller and newer than that postcard.

In May 1768, at twenty-five, he directed enslaved workers to begin leveling an 868-foot mountaintop he already called Monticello, Italian for little mountain.

The family house at Shadwell burned on 1 February 1770 and took most of his books and papers with it.

By November 1770 he was living in the South Pavilion, the first brick building on the mountaintop and the first structure he designed that was actually built.

The main house was still rising around him.

He had already been elected to the House of Burgesses in 1768 and admitted to the Virginia bar the year before.

The mountain was not a retirement project. It was the workplace he chose while he still had a public career ahead of him.

Two years later Martha Wayles Skelton joined him here after their marriage.

He would spend four decades putting the house up and pulling it down, including a later expansion that knocked out walls of the first house.

The building that stands now is a museum, not a private home.

The pin is the house on the leveled summit, not the later visitor center below it.

Photo: YF12s, Monticello, 29 October 2010, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons