This bronze bust of Thomas Jefferson, the country’s third president, stands at the entrance of his Monticello plantation near Charlottesville, Virginia. He spent most of his adulthood building the elaborate, Neoclassical mansion on the top of a hill until he died in its bedroom on July 4, 1826. The 5,000 acre estate for tobacco and wheat included slave quarters plus a dairy barn, store house, a nail factory, a sizable wine cellar and an experimental vegetable garden. Both his grave and those of his slaves are nearby.
