It all comes back here.
My new state makes a good first impression. From the southern border shared with North Carolina up through the center, it’s exactly as you would imagine: huge yet humble farm homes standing alone on perfect green fields. Little mailboxes and big American flags hung from actual flagpoles. Counties named after old English places and royals — Charlotte (for the queen), Prince Edward, Buckingham.
This is the sort of country that Thomas Jefferson hoped would blanket the continent. As I have covered in my trip, things got a bit more varied than he expected. No matter. The agrarian ideal lives on in rural Virginia.
Jefferson lived to see a frontier town emerge just five miles from the plantation where he was born. The founders called it Charlottesville, also for the aforementioned Queen Charlotte. This is where Jefferson chose to build one of his three most cherished accomplishments, the University of Virginia. He made sure to put the school on his tombstone, following only the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia law he drafted to ensure freedom of conscience.
Today, Charlottesville is a proper city in population but still a small country town in spirit. All is quaint and quiet downtown.
The restaurants are old enough to be called taverns. It’s only right to stay at an inn, not a hotel. The Dinsmore Inn, next to the university, was built in 1817 by James Dinsmore, the Irish master carpenter who helped construct Jefferson’s home. Each of the nine guest rooms is beautiful and unique, but when one is called the Madison Room, there’s really no discussion.
Also, there is a room available to all guests dedicated to Virginia wines. Jefferson would be thrilled.
Speaking of Jefferson and his home, the storied estate still sits on a mountain a few miles away. Before automobiles, visitors would need to hike a winding dirt road or force an unlucky horse to climb it for them. Monticello was the reward.
Here’s the amazing part: There are three stories packed into this house — plus an extensive cellar with many rooms. Jefferson deliberately disguised the second floor from the outside so as not to appear gaudy to his neighbors. In one of his signature contradictions, he craved both luxury and modesty.
If you were fortunate enough to be invited in, however, that’s when Jefferson quit worrying about showing off. The home’s 33 rooms are a shrine to a crackling mind at work for a lifetime, filled to the brim with artifacts, trinkets, inventions, portraits, and oh so many books. (A dual addiction to books and wine drove Jefferson deeply into debt. Understandable, honestly.)
Here is the study of a man with too many thoughts and too little time.
Too little space, as well. Jefferson was so obsessed with maximizing room for his possessions that he carved his bed into the wall. Imagine a 6′2.5″ man sleeping in this for decades on end.
I won’t spoil any more. Monticello is really something every American needs to see for himself. The staff still grows vegetables in the garden that Jefferson cultivated outside. Historians have restored everything they could, down to the wallpaper. And, just before you leave, you can say goodbye to the man himself.
It is only fitting that I arrive in Virginia in America’s 250th year to begin a new chapter. This state, in many ways, is where America started. Where the English colonial project began, with a hasty venture in Jamestown. It is the state that gave the nation its dutiful father from Mount Vernon, its foremost constitutional genius, and the writer who articulated the American creed as no other could.
My journey across this glorious country has come to an end, but I am far from done seeing America. There are still the forests of New England and the Southwestern deserts. Yellowstone, the Everglades, Big Sky Country. Plane tickets to Alaska and Hawaii. I still have 23 states and 15 ballparks left to go (16 once the A’s get to Vegas).
But, like the nation itself, Virginia comes first. What a perfect place to start again.
This is the final installment in a cross-country road-trip adventure.