 | Documentary History of the Construction of the Buildings at the University
of Virginia, 1817-1828 |  |
Epilogue
"The last act of usefulness I can render"
on its frail materials. The columns are of stucco, some of the capitals and bases
of wood, others imported at immense expense from Italy to be joined to brick
and plaster. The mortar is peeling off in many places, showing the red bricks
underneath. The wood is yawining, with wide, long splits.
—John H. B. Latrobe, 1832[821]
In a wonderful collection of family letters housed at the Library of Congress in our nations
capitol, 19th-century author and socialite Margaret Bayard Smith described her first visit to
the University of Virginia in an 1828 letter to her sisters, Anna Bayard Boyd of New York
City, and Jane Bayard Kirkpatrick of Brunswick, New Jersey:
Town—Never have I beheld a more imposing work of Art—On a Commanding
height, surround[ed] by mountains, rises the Rotunda, or central building,
forming one side of an oblong square—on two other sides running from North
to south are the Pavillions, or Professor's houses—at about 60 or 70 feet apart,
connected by terraces, beneath which are the dormitories, or Lodging sleeping
rooms of the students—The terrace, projects about 8 feet beyond the rooms & is
supported on brick Arches, forming beneath the arcade a paved walk, sheltered
from the heats of summer & the storms of winter—A vast wide lawn separates
the two rows of Pavillions & dormitories—the South end is at present open, &
standing there gives a noble & magnificent view of the buildings—There are 12
Pavillions—each one exhibiting the different orders of Architecture & built
after classic models—generally Grecian—The Rotunda is in form &
proportioned like the Pantheon at Rome—it has a noble portico—the Pillars,
cornice, &ca of the Corinthian.
We went to the house of Professor Lomax, who is a near relation of William
Washingtons & were most kindly & hospitably received—He has a very large
family—wife & daughters friendly & agreeable. We sat in the Portico of his
Pavillion & feasted our eyes on the beauties of the surrounding scenery—Then
walked through the buildings—visited the Rotunda & the library—a
magnificent apartment—larger & more beautiful than the library in the
Capitol—but I cannot go into details—The whole impression on my
mind—was delightful—elevating!—for the objects both of nature & art by
which I was surrounded, are equaly sublime & beautiful. . . . Professor Lomax
is a charming man— . . .
He & I sat in the Library looking over books & conversi[n]g on literary subjects
for more than two hours, while the young people were roaming about &
climbing to the dome or roof of the Rotunda I have seldom passed two hours
more agreeably. . . . A violent shower prevented our going up one of the
adjoining mountains, on the top of which the Observatory is built.—Anna
Maria was positively enchanted & I could scarcely get her away—[822]
This interesting scene at the University of Virginia described by Mrs. Smith took place just
two years after Thomas Jefferson died. For the last ten years of his life Jefferson had been
consumed with establishing what he called "the hobby of my old age."[823] "Our University,"
he declared in 1820, "is the last of my mortal cares, and the last service I can render my
country."[824] In his final year he wrote, "I am closing the last scenes of my life by fashioning
and fostering an establishment for the instruction of those who are to come after us. I hope
its influence on their virtue, freedom, fame, and happiness will be salutary and
permanent."[825] If Jefferson could have seen beyond 1826 into the future he more than likely
would have been pleased with the success of "the hobby" of his last years. To a great degree
the university's permanence that Jefferson so longed for was secured by his wisdom in
executing the design and construction of the physical structures of his Academical Village.
We remember Jefferson most for his lofty political ideals and remarkable intellectual
vigorand range but when we look at these old historic buildings we see him in another, more
tangible light. In her delightful manner of writing, Margaret Bayard Smith finished her
description of the university in another letter ten days later:
University of Virginia—One of the finest specimens of art & the most
magnificent Institution I have ever seen—It has a most imposing effect—In a
city, or land cultivated country it would not be so impressive—But on a noble
height—embosomed in mountains—surrounded with a landscape so rich,
varied & beautiful—so remote from any city—There was something novel, as
well as grand in its locality, that certainly had a strong effect on the
imagination. Were I, a young man & a student there—methinks the place,
alone, would purify & elevate my mind—[826]
Thomas Jefferson's Academical Village has inspired over the last 170 years many such
observations, of which Mrs. Smith's is but one of the earliest. The feelings of delight and
elevation which she felt during her visit is exactly what Jefferson himself had in mind when
he conceived and designed the buildings and grounds of the University of Virginia. He knew
that the New World lagged far behind the Old, with its rich traditions and longer history, but
he sincerely thought the future belonged to America and that the applied arts could be
cultivated and enhanced and, in time, even surpass the achievements of Europe. Tradition
might be a great asset in keeping order and maintaining continuity in society, and it might be
an excellent source to appeal to in certain circumstances, but no one knew better than
Thomas Jefferson the opposing tendency of tradition to inhibit and prevent the progress of
man and the improvement of his environment. He consciously designed the physical part of
his Academical Village with the intention of producing awe in its viewers; he hoped his
designs would remind and call attention to the grandeur and dignity of the ancient classical
world to which he and the other founding fathers had turned to so often in creating a new
nation. But Jefferson was no mere romantic: his fondness for things Roman and his looking
backwards contained a strong utilitarian element. He always looked favorably upon the past,
gazed warily at the present, and expectantly into the future. He harbored no desire to
recreate in America a new England or a new France, or even a new Rome for that matter;
the colonial period had ended and for the new nation that was being born Jefferson wanted
new buildings in which to "enshrine its activities."[827] In designing the builidings for the
University of Virginia he sought to provide its prospective students not only with a pleasant
and practical environment for study but an example of correct architecture to enhance that
instruction. More important, however, Jefferson hoped the "delightful, elevating" work of art
spoken of by Margaret Bayard Smith would inspire those young men to contemplate and
reflect upon the nobleness of the human intellect and spirit which lay behind it and thus
move them forward and upwards in building the new republic.
And what are we to make of Jefferson's scheme? It was a noble experiment in the grand
style. Only someone with Jefferson's statue, with his calibre of intellect, his stately brand of
optimism, could ever hope to pull it off. In a sense, Jefferson's whole life had been leading
up to the founding of the University of Virginia; it was the capstone to a remarkable and
distinguished career. His had been a life with a string of notable successes, beginning with
the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. He served as Virginia's wartime governor,
the United State's first Minister to France, and as the nations's vice-president before
becoming president of the United States in the peaceful Revolution of 1800. As president he
carved out a permanent niche in the annals of the young republic in 1803 when doubled the
size of the country by making the Lousiana Purchase. But not content with retirement after
nearly forty years of public service, Jefferson spent his last decade in a working frenzy to
bring to birth the infant university and to secure its future as it began to stand upon its own
wobbly legs and take its first steps. An important and integral part of its success was the
atmosphere created by the buildings Jefferson designed. Writing about the grounds that then
appeared, John S. Patton remarked, "With their connecting dormitories and Tuscan arcades
they presented, even in the rough state of their surroundings, a dignity and beauty which
favorably impressed all beholders."[828] George Ticknor of Harvard assured his historian
friend William Prescott that the Academical Village was "a mass of buildings more beautiful
than anything architectural in New England and more appropriate to an university than can
be found, perhaps, in the world."[829] Roger G. Kennedy, more recently, described Jefferson's
creation in this way:
The temples and colonnades around the Lawn at the University of Virginia compose the
most satisfying assemblage of beautiful structures in the Western Hemisphere and, to my
eye, the highest expression of American humanism. . . . This is a holy place . . . as befits the
sanctuary of humane reason. . . . The area of the Lawn is a sacred space; each of the temples
placed about it—each lodge, each pavilion—shadows its own smaller sacred space. Mr.
Jefferson and Mr. Madison meant for attending the University of Virginia to be felt as a
serious undertaking. That is one of the reasons Jefferson wept when discussing the antics of
riotous students who did not seem to understand that what had been created for them here
was sacred space.[830]
Perhaps it would be appropriate to repeat Margaret Bayard Smith's words that "the whole
impression on my mind was delightful, elevating, for the objects both of nature and art by
which I was surrounded are equally sublime and beautiful."
In closing, I borrow again from the famous architect, Fiske Kimball, who described Mr.
Jefferson's Academical Village this way:
temple-like Pavilions, which once housed the classes of the ten schools as well
as their heads. Between them, fronting the low dormitories, are the long white
rows of the Colonnades. At the head, on the highest ground, stands the
Rotunda, circular like the Roman Pantheon, with its dome and lofty spacious
Corinthian porch. It is, in Jefferson's phrase, the perfect model of "spherical
architecture," as the temples beside it are of the cubical. Beyond the lawn
colonnades, facing outward, are second rows of dormitories, the Ranges with
their red arches.
Ordered, calm, serene, it stirs our blood with a magic rarely felt on this side of
the ocean. A single impress of form unites all the parts into an overwhelming
artistic effect. The grandiose symmetry of disposition, the rhythmic alternation
of pavilion and colonnade, the jewel-like simplicity of the major units, square-
faceted and round, with their contrast like diamond and pearl, the eternal
recurrence of the white columns, as a treble against the ground-bass of red
walls, are elements of this effect which in its perfection surpasses analysis, and
tells us we are in the presence of the supreme work of a great artist.[831]
821. Quoted in Sublette, "'Models Of Taste & Good Architecture': The Preservation of
Thomas Jeffersonian Properties," University of Virginia Alumni News, 80 (October 1991),
4-5. Latrobe was the son of architect Benjamin Latrobe.
822. Margeret Bayard Smith to Anna Bayard Boyd and Jane Bayard Kirkpatrick, 2 August
1828, DLC: Papers of Margaret Bayard Smith, quoted in Frank E. Grizzard, Jr. (ed. and
intr.), "'Three Grand & Interesting Objects,' An 1828 Visit to Monticello, the University,
and Montpelier," Magazine of Albemarle County History, 51 (1993), 116-30; see also Hunt,
The First Forty Years of Washington Society in the Family Letters of Margaret Bayard Smith
223-37. Margaret Bayard Smith (1778-1844) was the author of many stories and essays as
well as two books, A Winter in Washington; or, Memoirs of the Seymour Family (1824), a
two-volume novel containing anecdotes of early 19th-century Washington society, and What
is Gentility? (1828). She married Samuel Harrison Smith (1772-1845), who at Jefferson's
urging founded the Daily National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser in 1800. Anna
Maria was the Smiths' young daughter. John Tayloe Lomax (1781-1862) of Caroline
County, Virginia, was a Fredericksburg attorney who served as the university's first
professor of law from 1826 to 1830, when he resigned to sit on the bench of the state circuit
court at Fredericksburg.
824. TJ to José Francesco Corrêa Da Serra, quoted in Ford, Writings of Thomas Jefferson,
10:163; see also Jefferson Cyclopedia, 900.
825. TJ to A. B. Woodward, 1825; quoted in Ford, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 10:342;
Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, 900.
826. Smith to Anna Bayard Boyd and Jane Bayard Kirkpatrick, 12 August 1828,
DLC:Margaret Bayard Smith Papers, quoted in Grizzard, "Three Grand & Interesting
Objects," Magazine of Albemarle County History, 51 (1993), 116-30; see also Hunt, First
Forty Years of Washington Society, 223-37.
827. Hamlin, Greek Revival Architecture in America, 6. Peterson says that Jefferson,
recognizing the dark side of the ancient world and believing that the world belonged to the
living, did not long for for a "golden age" of the past but looked to the good side of the
classical world in order to inform the modern predicament (Thomas Jefferson and the New
Nation, 50).
| Documentary History of the Construction of the Buildings at the University
of Virginia, 1817-1828 | |