A Residence Fit For A President

New evidence revises a long-held belief about James Monroe’s home

- Traci Watson

WHILE VISITORS TO THE homes of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington are escorted through fine mansions, tourists coming to the Albemarle County, Virginia, home of President James Monroe see a cottage. The modest clapboard house, located on the bucolic estate Monroe called Highland, was billed for more than a century as his family’s main residence for much of his presidency.

To some visitors, the cottage may well have seemed commonplace, and a bit small for the home of a prominent family, headed by a man who stood roughly six feet tall. But for decades, few questions arose. Perhaps that was because Monroe—a Founding Father who fought in the Revolutionary War, a statesman who helped negotiate the Louisiana Purchase, and an enormously popular two-term president—is often perceived as a man of humble origins. His father had been apprenticed to a carpenter, and Monroe has been described as a woodworker’s son and “farm boy” on a “second-tier Virginia farm.” A nineteenth-century etching of Monroe’s boyhood home shows what, to modern eyes, looks like a rough-hewn cabin, reinforcing the impression.

Currently, though, Highland’s cottage is turning out to be a lesson in how a small misunderstanding—or deception— becomes a big one. “Much of colonial history—and the history of buildings—is like plaque building up in your arteries. It just hardens and hardens,” says architectural historian Carl Lounsbury, who worked for decades at Virginia’s Colonial Williamsburg, the eighteenth-century living-history museum. “And sometimes you’ve got to scrape it all away.”