Museum accessions.(Louisiana Purchase)

In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson negotiated the Louisiana Purchase, adding more than eight hundred thousand square miles to the young United States at a cost of approximately fifteen million dollars. Ironically, last year the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in Charlottesville, Virginia, paid just about the same price to acquire some 330 acres that had once been part of Monticello, Jefferson's estate in Charlottesville. The purchase reunites what Jefferson called Montalto (high mountain) with his "little mountain" (Monticello) and preserves for posterity his view from the property--a luxury enjoyed by relatively few historic houses today.

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In 1771, three years after he began clearing and leveling the land on which he built Monticello, Jefferson recorded that Edward Carter had agreed to "give me as much of his nearest mountain as can be seen from mine, and 100 yards beyond the line of sight." The sale was completed in 1777, with Jefferson paying 190 pounds for 483 acres. In Jefferson's time the land was mostly wooded and probably provided him with lumber as well as woodland grazing for pigs and cattle. He made sketches for observation towers to be built on Montalto and considered building a system to carry water from there to Monticello, but none of these schemes were realized. In 1832, six years after Jefferson's death, his heirs sold Montalto, and it changed hands numerous times over the next century and a half, until purchased in the 1960s by the Mountaintop Land Trust, from which it was purchased by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

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The view toward Montalto shown at the top left of this page is from the vegetable garden at Monticello, a few steps down from the kitchen that Jefferson built in 1809 to replace a small cooking room ...