Monticello is an architectural masterpiece designed and inhabited by Thomas Jefferson, Founding Father and third US President. 'I am as happy nowhere else and in no other society, and all my wishes end, where I hope my days will end, at Monticello,' wrote Jefferson, who spent 40 years building his dream home, finally completed in 1809. Today it is the only home in America designated a UN World Heritage site.
Built in Roman neoclassical style, the house was the centerpiece of a 5000-acre plantation tended by 150 slaves. Monticello today does not gloss over Jefferson's role as a slave owner nor the likelihood that he fathered children with slave Sally Hemings, a complicated past of the man who declared that 'all men are created equal' in the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson and his family are buried in a small wooded plot near the home.
