Montpelier: The Home of Our Fourth President

Additions in the late 1700s and early 1800s created separate entrances on each side of the original main entrance. The large Tuscan portico with four classical columns carries a pediment that shelters all three doors. Other design elements were added, including decorating the portico. A semicircle window was centered in the pediment and trimmed in dental molding. The portico’s symmetrical pediment and semicircular window complement the window and pediment over the house’s main front door. (Ron Cogswell/CC BY 2.0)

Prominent Virginia planter, politician, and patriot James Madison, Sr. built Montpelier for his family in 1760. The structure was designed in a Georgian architectural style in Orange County, just north of Charlottesville, Virginia. Originally, the home sported a simple, yet formal symmetrical façade.

By the late 1700s, however, James Madison, Jr. and his wife, Dolley, made changes and additions to the home on the advice of friend and colleague Thomas Jefferson, for whom Madison served as secretary of state. Madison enhanced the house’s classical architectural aspects by adding a 30-foot wing to the northeast end of the house,  a Tuscan-style portico, and columns on the front of the house. During his first term as president (1809–1812), Madison made further additions. Beside a large drawing room, he added one-story wings at each end of the house to ensure privacy and separate spaces for Madison Jr. and Dolley, since Madison’s parents still dwelled at Montpelier.

In 1901, the property was purchased by American businessman and banker William du Pont Sr. (1855–1928), who made extensive additions to the main house and nearly doubled its size. From 2003 to 2008, the National Trust for Historic Preservation oversaw a restoration project to return the structure to the original form, when it was occupied by James and Dolley Madison.

An arched glass entryway with flanking faux fluted columns display the Drawing Room’s Federal style. This style is determined by its elliptical, circular, and fan-shaped motifs, clearly evident in the transom and side lights of this wide double door. (Courtesy of Montpelier)

The Drawing Room served as the Madison’s grand entertaining space. Ceiling molding designs complemented the ornamentation around the fireplace. A mixture of chalk, hide glue, linseed oil, pine resin, and sawdust was mixed and used to make the decorative moldings; the moldings were then painted. The hearthstone in front of the fireplace was quarried in England. Red-flock (wool-fiber) was block-printed as wallpaper, textured to resemble lush velvet. Silk damask fabric on French Neoclassical style furnishings and the tasseled window treatments coordinated with the wall covering. (Courtesy of Montpelier)

James Madison’s desk in the second-floor library is where he spent time establishing the framework for the “Virginia Plan” that eventually informed the content of the U.S. Constitution. The 18th-century walnut and yellow pine desk, positioned in front of a west-facing window, enabled an expansive view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. (Courtesy of Montpelier)

The simple bookshelves house thousands of books, and the original heart-pine floors exhibit what are supposed to be ink stains that are more than a century old. The main adornment in this room, other than some of the gold-leaf and leather book spines, is the arched, three-panel fireplace with triple molding decorated with a central keystone. (Courtesy of Montpelier)

Upon entering the garden, visitors walk down and past a marble sundial. The gardens open up to the grounds, which are over 2,600 acres of rolling hills and pastures that are part of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Madison family cemetery, the two-acre Annie du Pont Formal Garden, and a forest of old-growth trees are a part of the property. (Billy Hathorn/CC BY-SA 3.0)

Referred to as the Temple, the monopteron (a circle of columns supporting a domed roof) was built on the Montpelier grounds in the early 1800s over a two-story brick-lined ice well. Anna Thornton, wife of William Thornton, architect of the nation’s Capital, drew up the original sketch for the Temple, inspired by the ancient Roman Temple of Vesta, the goddess of the hearth and home. Brick pillars are covered with stucco to resemble marble columns. The domed roof is topped with cypress shingles, and a repeating triple-column motif defines the frieze just below the dome. (Courtesy of Montpelier)

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