Epilogue
"The last act of usefulness I can render"

The whole has a shabby genteel look and is already showing marks left by time 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 ⁽¹⁾

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:

In the afternoon, we went to the University, it is about 1¼ miles from 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—⁽²⁾

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."⁽³⁾ "Our University," he declared in 1820, "is the last of my mortal cares, and the last service I can render my country."⁽⁴⁾ 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."⁽⁵⁾ 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:

I entirely forget where I left off, but if not mistaken it was after I had been at the 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—⁽⁶⁾

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."⁽⁷⁾ 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."⁽⁸⁾ 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."⁽⁹⁾ 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.⁽¹⁰⁾

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:

Up and down either side of the shaded Lawn are the tall, storied porticoes of the 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. ⁽¹¹⁾

1. 1. 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.

2. 2. 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.

3. 3. TJ to George Ticknor, 24 December 1819, DLC:TJ.

4. 4. TJ to José Francesco Corrêa Da Serra, quoted in Ford, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 10:163; see also Jefferson Cyclopedia, 900.

5. 5. TJ to A. B. Woodward, 1825; quoted in Ford, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 10:342; Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, 900.

6. 6. 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.

7. 7. 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).

8. 8. Patton, Jefferson, Cabell and the University of Virginia, 184.

9. 9. Ibid., 184–85.

10. 10. Kennedy, Rediscovering America, 204, 215–16.

11. 11. Kimball, American Architecture, 83–84.