Biography | Thomas Jefferson — His University Opened Under This Unfinished Dome on 7 March 1825

People photograph the Rotunda as if the university opened under a finished dome.

It did not.

The University of Virginia opened on 7 March 1825 with a few dozen students and five professors, all of them recruited from abroad.

Two more professors arrived a month later. By year's end the roll had passed one hundred.

Jefferson had laid out an Academical Village rather than a single college building: pavilions for faculty, ranges of student rooms, and a library at the head of the Lawn modeled on the Roman Pantheon.

The legislature had chartered the university on 25 January 1819. Pavilion construction had started in 1817, when the project was still Central College.

The Rotunda itself was late.

The Visitors reported in 1822 that every building but one was done.

Work on the dome began in 1823 and was still unfinished when the first class matriculated.

In November 1824 Jefferson and James Madison even hosted the Marquis de Lafayette on an upper floor that was not yet complete.

Jefferson died the next year, on 4 July 1826, before the Rotunda was finished. The last original building was completed that September.

The pin is the Rotunda at the north end of the Lawn, the building he designed as the library and the public room of the place.

Photo: Rotunda of the University of Virginia from the southeast, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons