A History of the American People

efficient central government and the recovery of American credit, the passion for villa-building
intensified. The Schuylkill, near America's richest city, Philadelphia, like the Thames to the west
of London, was soon dotted with these delectable edifices, every few hundred yards.
The Schuylkill villa-rush became a positive stampede in 1793 when the worst outbreak of
yellow fever in America's history killed one in ten of Philadelphia's inhabitants. Between 1793
and 1810 scores of villas emerged, each with its own pleasure-gardens or landscaped park, so
that, said a visitor, The countryside [near Philadelphia] is very pleasant and agreeable, finely interspersed with genteel country seats, fields and orchards, for several miles around.' That is exactly the impression the new American ruling class wished to convey. None more so than Jefferson, who studied and practiced not only statesmanship but architecture all his life. Unfortunately, his divided nature, the simultaneous existence in his personality of incompatible opposites, his indecisiveness, his open-mindedness and changeability, combined to turn his building activities, especially at Monticello, into a nightmare saga. His plan to create a Palladian villa of his own design first unfolded in 1768 and work continued for virtually the rest of his life, the building being finished, insofar as it ever was, in the winter of 1823-4. It is just as well that Jefferson had no sense of humor: he constitutes in his own way an egregious comic character, accident-prone and vertiginous, to whom minor catastrophes accrued. Almost from the start, the house was lived in, and guests invited there, though it was, by grandee standards, uninhabitable. When Jefferson became president, work on the house had proceeded for over thirty years, but half the rooms were unplastered and many had no flooring. One guest, Anna Maria Thornton, was surprised to find the upper floor reached bya little ladder of a
staircase ... very steep' (it is still there). On the second floor, where she slept, the window came
down to the ground so there was no privacy but it was so short she had to crouch to see the view.
The entrance hall had a clock perched awkwardly over the doorway, driven by cannon-ball
weights in the corners, and with a balcony jutting out at the back.
The house was full of ingenious but amateurish Heath Robinson devices such as this, many of
which do not work to this day. The library consisted not of shelves but of individual boxes
stacked on top of each other, a weird arrangement. The dining-room looked into the tea-room
and was only closed off by glass doors, shut in cold weather. The Dome Room proved an
insoluble problem. There was no way to heat it, as a chimney flue would have marred its external
appearance-the whole point of its existence-so Jefferson could not install a stove. Hence it was
never used. The ice-house, attached to the main building, must have been one of the most
awkward structures ever devised. It was filled, unusually, by cisterns but they were riddled by
leaks and in Jefferson's day only two out of four ever held water. The chimneys proved too low
and blew smoke into the house; the fires smoked too and gave out little heat. Jefferson was too
jealous of Count Rumford's fame to install a 'Rumford,' the first really elegant drawing-room
fireplace, so much admired by Jane Austen. He insisted on producing his own design, which did
not work. The bedrooms were mere alcoves. Jefferson was constantly being delivered the wrong
wood, or too much wood, or too little wood, and when he got the right wood one of several fires
destroyed the kiln for drying it. As originally built, his bedroom accorded him no privacy at all, a
curious oversight considering he had a passion for being alone and unobserved. Thereafter the
search for privacy became an obsession in the many changes of design, and in the end he built
two large porticoes, which did not fit into the Palladian design at all and were merely screens for
his bedroom. Contemporaries assumed they were there so that his alleged mistress, Sally
Herrings, could slip in and out of his chamber unobserved. Whether this was so we cannot now
judge because they were removed in 1890.