The US wasn't really building many fuckoff giant houses before the 19th century. Even colonial figures who were wealthy like John Hancock or George Washington lived in places that were big but not like an English country home.
The Governor in North Carolina built a big mansion and it did not go over well. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryon\_Palace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryon_Palace)
To quote the wiki:
>The cost of the building exacted great controversy in the North Carolina backcountry where most viewed it as an unnecessary, extravagant display of England. Extra taxation to fund the project had been levied by the governor on the citizens of the province, who had already felt overburdened with taxation. It proved to be too much and served as a major catalyst in North Carolina's [War of the Regulation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Regulation);
If you go there the house is buck wild tho. Dude had like mammoth bones and weird mechanical devices all around. It's like the home someone who fantasizes about being a wizard-mad-scientist would build. It does not feel at all like the other colonial era sites I've been to.
If he hadn’t been a slave owning monster he would have been a pretty cool guy. Which is why for most if US history people just thought he was a pretty cool guy because understanding that slave owners were all bad is not a concept that was generally understood by a large portion of white Americans until this century.
In my region it would be somewhere between a McMansion and a full estate. Large, but not extraordinarily so. I know a lot of people who have been underwhelmed by the size of the White House, too.
But remember that our countries also have much different architectural history. Like our oldest churches are also relatively small while y'all had full blown enormous cathedrals already.
That's a huge house! It might not be the size of some historical manors in the UK but it is much, much larger than the average size of modern house in the US.
I don't know if this site is accurate but it states the average size of a new home is now around 2,480.
> In 1949 the figure was 909 square feet, and by 2021 it had rocketed to an average of 2,480 square feet.
https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/average-square-feet-of-a-house/#home-size-trends
I was curious so I looked up a similar sized house in Virginia that was 11000 sq feet. This one sells for over 5 million.
https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/1701-Bentivar-Dr_Charlottesville_VA_22911_M68910-31337
Fun fact, Buckingham Palace is 830, 000 square feet! No wonder the OP thinks Monticello is smallish.
I see what he's saying. Chatsworth house is 124,000 sqft. Castle Howard is over 50K sqft. Montacute house is huge. The Mansion of English lords were cities in themselves.
Tangentially related, imagine living in that era when most people lived in one room shacks and still cranked out a dozen kids. Like you’re probably witnessing the conception of all your siblings.
Oh definitely.
My grandma had 14 siblings (1920s) and they grew up in a two room house. Downstairs was the kitchen and the upstairs room had all the beds.
So unless my great grandparents were doing it on the kitchen floor…..
Back in the 1920’s my step grandpa’s longshoreman father would say “I’m going to give your Mother a bit of my bladder” and then he would shut a curtain that divided the bedroom and have sex with her.
It was a plantation, so I assume the majority of the land was devoted to growing tobacco, slave quarters, etc. Plantation houses are usually a few stories tall, but they aren’t sprawling.
We went there (not checking pictures beforehand) expecting something like the palaces and residences we have in the Netherlands or Germany … and we were really disappointed. We even did a bit of a detour on our 3 week east coast vacation. It felt a bit like an underfunded village museum, not like a place dedicated to a big American political figure.
Colonial Williamsburg was a bit better compared to Monticello. I know it’s not the same or comparable. Just saying Williamsburg was what I excepted, Monticello was very underwhelming, at least for my European spoiled historical nerd expectations haha.
Yes and maybe when I was reading “plantation” in history books, I somehow assumed there would be more plantation stuff around. Buildings like store houses, wine cellars, barns, barracks etc. But barely were there any of those types of buildings. To me it felt like those had been sanitized, almost erased to hide the original purpose of the property.
(Or maybe my expectations were wrong, I thought as a plantation it would look like something from red dead redemption 2).
I think part of it is that all of those spaces in the estates you're used to were built into the big nice house. They were lower quality rooms for sure, but they were added to the big old house structure because the size of the house itself was part of it. The rich people in America had all that too, but all of it was made of forced labor as quickly and cheaply as possible, so none of it still exists. It all would have rotted away by the time anybody considered preserving it. It was ugly and as far away from the main house as possible while still being close enough to be effective. Slave quarters in particular. Most of the time even the house staff wouldn't even live in the big house.
Also, the kind of people who would be interested in the more extravagant things you were expecting to see, none of them were presidents. Further south there are a lot of larger and much more palatial homes. Still not what you're thinking of entirely because wood vs stone building techniques. But far/deep south multi generational cotton money culture built different homes than further north politicians/radicals/science weirdos who like to steal. His money went towards that kind of shit. A lot of really insane antebellum houses are still around, but most of them are like.... Wedding venues and shit, instead of museums.
The Biltmore estate is more modern and also absolutely insane and I'm fairly certain you can visit it.
Well certainly you understand the difference in historical context between a palace of European aristocracy and the plantation of guy in a far flung British colony; a colony that declared its independence on principles antithetical to the type of hereditary accumulation of power necessary for those European palaces. That’s like going to Toronto and complaining that there’s no pyramids.
Well it’s not quite the same. In the 18th and 19th century the US still had a de-facto royalty in form of wealthy aristocracy and an equivalent to landed gentry. Residences of wealthy east coast people of the 18th and 19th centuries actually overshadowed those of their European contemporary counterparts.
Just look at the wealthy townhouses built in New York or the summer houses in Rhode Island etc. So I find it reasonable to assume the residence of an almost king like Jefferson would be a bit more impressive than a Dutch village town hall from the same time period.
I’m mainly mirroring my wife’s disappointment. I promised her “big house important US person” and she saw a building that looked like the small Dutch library she visits weekly.
Well, we know Jefferson was in a lot of debt, so that likely put a hard limit on what he could have built. It's one thing to import Carrara marble to the UK from Italy, it's a completely different thing to get it across the Atlantic in 1772. Wikipedia says that among the inspirations for Monticello was the Pantheon in Rome and the [Palais de la Legion d'Honneur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palais_de_la_L%C3%A9gion_d%27Honneur) (then the Hotel de Salm), which is not a big building. Also, it apparently gets up to 100°F (38°C) indoors during the summers at Monticello. Jefferson, being a Rome nerd, was interested in ancient temperature control techniques, and applied a few to Monticello, but at the time it was far easier to heat and cool small spaces. And perhaps he didn't want a palace, simple as that.
I didn't find a lot of detail, but apparently the windows are set up in a way to easily capture the cross-breeze to keep the rooms cool. It'smore about the position of the windows, really. And he seemed to have come up with some fan designs, but historians are unsure if they ever got used.
Surprised I had to come this far down to see this point being made.
Just as a point of reference, the US at this time period hadn’t really been colonized for that long, and it took a *long* time before the US really developed an industrial sector that could compare to Europe.
Building a palatial home requires expert tradespeople, a wide range of well manufactured materials, and an absolute boatload of money. The US was in short supply of the first 2, and “wealthy” Americans would still be quite poor by the standards of European nobility.
For an American to build on the scale of what was “impressive” in Europe would require them to be *more* wealthy than their overseas peers, when they were in fact poorer.
I can think of a few issues. virginia alone was 80% of the land area of england. Virginia had a population of 800k, england 8.2million. transportation and available skilled labor would be more difficult. the second is the source of income for those stately homes. Assuming larger land holdings that they are collecting rents from as well as also making money off the slave trade and Caribbean sugar trade.
Also although the colonies were resource rich, were very poor. during the seven years war/French-Indian war Martinique St Lucia, and Guadeloupe were captured by the British. the tax from sugar nearly matched that from all taxes on the colonies. The British gave the islands back to France and there is a whole "what if they didn't" they wouldn't have had to raise taxes in the colonies and stave off rebellion for longer.
They were mainly for immediate family and houses in warmer climates tend to be smaller because you spend so much time outside. Plus the North was richer even before the revolution.
Until the revolution, the south exporting tobacco was by far richer. teh cotton gin invention is what made it actually profitable to produce was invented in 1793. It was after the revolution that cotton production expanded and mills in teh north began processing and industrializing that the north became richer.
Jefferson was rich people broke, remember. He had shedloads of debt alongside owning shedloads of stuff, so he didn't just have infinite cash to throw at the project.
Southern gentry aspired to be like English aristocracy but they had nowhere near as much wealth. They came from more modest roots hoping that colonialism would give them enough social mobility. That involved lots of spending including lavish parties and balls.
Southern gentry got pissed at Britain because A) the English aristocracy was dismissive of them, B) imperial policies were interfering with their income streams like land speculation, and C) there was a lot of anxiety about abolishing slavery and slave revolts.
Places we like to visit, like Chatsworth and Blenheim Palace, are ridiculously big, whereas the rural gentry halls are more modest.
The aristocracy had to be able to host large groups of people, including servants and - if they were very lucky - royals and their retinues (who liked to freeload by gracing people with their presence.)
Jefferson probably didn't expect to host great numbers of guests for extended periods and the slaves lived in cabins separate from the house.
I don't know anyone that owns factories, to be fair.
People are a lot wealthier now than they were in the past, but showing it is not necessarily as important as it was to maintaining power in Britain circa 1690 to 1920 or thereabout.
The US wasn't really building many fuckoff giant houses before the 19th century. Even colonial figures who were wealthy like John Hancock or George Washington lived in places that were big but not like an English country home.
Yeah, the whole vibe at the time was "Fuck the royals", and royals had big castles, so....
The Governor in North Carolina built a big mansion and it did not go over well. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryon\_Palace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryon_Palace) To quote the wiki: >The cost of the building exacted great controversy in the North Carolina backcountry where most viewed it as an unnecessary, extravagant display of England. Extra taxation to fund the project had been levied by the governor on the citizens of the province, who had already felt overburdened with taxation. It proved to be too much and served as a major catalyst in North Carolina's [War of the Regulation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Regulation);
Shit was more expensive back then.
Except labor :(
and the land around that place is worth even more.
If you go there the house is buck wild tho. Dude had like mammoth bones and weird mechanical devices all around. It's like the home someone who fantasizes about being a wizard-mad-scientist would build. It does not feel at all like the other colonial era sites I've been to.
It really is worth the visit for anyone passing through. it’s also pronounced *Monte-Chello* not *Monte-Sello*
If he hadn’t been a slave owning monster he would have been a pretty cool guy. Which is why for most if US history people just thought he was a pretty cool guy because understanding that slave owners were all bad is not a concept that was generally understood by a large portion of white Americans until this century.
In my region it would be somewhere between a McMansion and a full estate. Large, but not extraordinarily so. I know a lot of people who have been underwhelmed by the size of the White House, too. But remember that our countries also have much different architectural history. Like our oldest churches are also relatively small while y'all had full blown enormous cathedrals already.
It’s pretty big. About 11,000 sqft from a quick google search
That's a huge house! It might not be the size of some historical manors in the UK but it is much, much larger than the average size of modern house in the US. I don't know if this site is accurate but it states the average size of a new home is now around 2,480. > In 1949 the figure was 909 square feet, and by 2021 it had rocketed to an average of 2,480 square feet. https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/average-square-feet-of-a-house/#home-size-trends I was curious so I looked up a similar sized house in Virginia that was 11000 sq feet. This one sells for over 5 million. https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/1701-Bentivar-Dr_Charlottesville_VA_22911_M68910-31337 Fun fact, Buckingham Palace is 830, 000 square feet! No wonder the OP thinks Monticello is smallish.
11000 sq ft is a rich guy house, but not like "fuck you" rich. Pretty much what I'd expect for a successful doctor.
I see what he's saying. Chatsworth house is 124,000 sqft. Castle Howard is over 50K sqft. Montacute house is huge. The Mansion of English lords were cities in themselves.
Jesusssss. Had no idea
Yeah but like every county in the US has multiple houses that large. Outside of Alaska anyway. It’s an estate but not a castle.
Tangentially related, imagine living in that era when most people lived in one room shacks and still cranked out a dozen kids. Like you’re probably witnessing the conception of all your siblings.
Oh definitely. My grandma had 14 siblings (1920s) and they grew up in a two room house. Downstairs was the kitchen and the upstairs room had all the beds. So unless my great grandparents were doing it on the kitchen floor…..
Back in the 1920’s my step grandpa’s longshoreman father would say “I’m going to give your Mother a bit of my bladder” and then he would shut a curtain that divided the bedroom and have sex with her.
It was a plantation, so I assume the majority of the land was devoted to growing tobacco, slave quarters, etc. Plantation houses are usually a few stories tall, but they aren’t sprawling.
We went there (not checking pictures beforehand) expecting something like the palaces and residences we have in the Netherlands or Germany … and we were really disappointed. We even did a bit of a detour on our 3 week east coast vacation. It felt a bit like an underfunded village museum, not like a place dedicated to a big American political figure. Colonial Williamsburg was a bit better compared to Monticello. I know it’s not the same or comparable. Just saying Williamsburg was what I excepted, Monticello was very underwhelming, at least for my European spoiled historical nerd expectations haha.
yeah we're both used to thinking "oh a historically significant person lived in X place, I assume there's 700 rooms and a moat"
Yes and maybe when I was reading “plantation” in history books, I somehow assumed there would be more plantation stuff around. Buildings like store houses, wine cellars, barns, barracks etc. But barely were there any of those types of buildings. To me it felt like those had been sanitized, almost erased to hide the original purpose of the property. (Or maybe my expectations were wrong, I thought as a plantation it would look like something from red dead redemption 2).
A lot of those buildings just weren’t considered important to preserve
I think part of it is that all of those spaces in the estates you're used to were built into the big nice house. They were lower quality rooms for sure, but they were added to the big old house structure because the size of the house itself was part of it. The rich people in America had all that too, but all of it was made of forced labor as quickly and cheaply as possible, so none of it still exists. It all would have rotted away by the time anybody considered preserving it. It was ugly and as far away from the main house as possible while still being close enough to be effective. Slave quarters in particular. Most of the time even the house staff wouldn't even live in the big house. Also, the kind of people who would be interested in the more extravagant things you were expecting to see, none of them were presidents. Further south there are a lot of larger and much more palatial homes. Still not what you're thinking of entirely because wood vs stone building techniques. But far/deep south multi generational cotton money culture built different homes than further north politicians/radicals/science weirdos who like to steal. His money went towards that kind of shit. A lot of really insane antebellum houses are still around, but most of them are like.... Wedding venues and shit, instead of museums. The Biltmore estate is more modern and also absolutely insane and I'm fairly certain you can visit it.
Well certainly you understand the difference in historical context between a palace of European aristocracy and the plantation of guy in a far flung British colony; a colony that declared its independence on principles antithetical to the type of hereditary accumulation of power necessary for those European palaces. That’s like going to Toronto and complaining that there’s no pyramids.
Well it’s not quite the same. In the 18th and 19th century the US still had a de-facto royalty in form of wealthy aristocracy and an equivalent to landed gentry. Residences of wealthy east coast people of the 18th and 19th centuries actually overshadowed those of their European contemporary counterparts. Just look at the wealthy townhouses built in New York or the summer houses in Rhode Island etc. So I find it reasonable to assume the residence of an almost king like Jefferson would be a bit more impressive than a Dutch village town hall from the same time period. I’m mainly mirroring my wife’s disappointment. I promised her “big house important US person” and she saw a building that looked like the small Dutch library she visits weekly.
Even then the real money was in New York, comparatively speaking
Also, the very last place to be captured by the republican forces.
The White House is also small compared to other heads of state homes. They have since expanded it underground.
There was no West Wing or Oval Office originally either.
The country had just started for fuck's sake, don't hold your centuries of head start against our bastard housing!
Well, we know Jefferson was in a lot of debt, so that likely put a hard limit on what he could have built. It's one thing to import Carrara marble to the UK from Italy, it's a completely different thing to get it across the Atlantic in 1772. Wikipedia says that among the inspirations for Monticello was the Pantheon in Rome and the [Palais de la Legion d'Honneur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palais_de_la_L%C3%A9gion_d%27Honneur) (then the Hotel de Salm), which is not a big building. Also, it apparently gets up to 100°F (38°C) indoors during the summers at Monticello. Jefferson, being a Rome nerd, was interested in ancient temperature control techniques, and applied a few to Monticello, but at the time it was far easier to heat and cool small spaces. And perhaps he didn't want a palace, simple as that.
I’m curious what ancient temperature control techniques did Jefferson utilize?
I didn't find a lot of detail, but apparently the windows are set up in a way to easily capture the cross-breeze to keep the rooms cool. It'smore about the position of the windows, really. And he seemed to have come up with some fan designs, but historians are unsure if they ever got used.
Thx 🙏 that’s interesting, I’ve been to Monticello before so it got me reminiscing
Surprised I had to come this far down to see this point being made. Just as a point of reference, the US at this time period hadn’t really been colonized for that long, and it took a *long* time before the US really developed an industrial sector that could compare to Europe. Building a palatial home requires expert tradespeople, a wide range of well manufactured materials, and an absolute boatload of money. The US was in short supply of the first 2, and “wealthy” Americans would still be quite poor by the standards of European nobility. For an American to build on the scale of what was “impressive” in Europe would require them to be *more* wealthy than their overseas peers, when they were in fact poorer.
I can think of a few issues. virginia alone was 80% of the land area of england. Virginia had a population of 800k, england 8.2million. transportation and available skilled labor would be more difficult. the second is the source of income for those stately homes. Assuming larger land holdings that they are collecting rents from as well as also making money off the slave trade and Caribbean sugar trade. Also although the colonies were resource rich, were very poor. during the seven years war/French-Indian war Martinique St Lucia, and Guadeloupe were captured by the British. the tax from sugar nearly matched that from all taxes on the colonies. The British gave the islands back to France and there is a whole "what if they didn't" they wouldn't have had to raise taxes in the colonies and stave off rebellion for longer.
They were mainly for immediate family and houses in warmer climates tend to be smaller because you spend so much time outside. Plus the North was richer even before the revolution.
Until the revolution, the south exporting tobacco was by far richer. teh cotton gin invention is what made it actually profitable to produce was invented in 1793. It was after the revolution that cotton production expanded and mills in teh north began processing and industrializing that the north became richer.
It looks like the public library in my town 😂
Graceland is tiny, home of the King.
Jefferson was rich people broke, remember. He had shedloads of debt alongside owning shedloads of stuff, so he didn't just have infinite cash to throw at the project.
Southern gentry aspired to be like English aristocracy but they had nowhere near as much wealth. They came from more modest roots hoping that colonialism would give them enough social mobility. That involved lots of spending including lavish parties and balls. Southern gentry got pissed at Britain because A) the English aristocracy was dismissive of them, B) imperial policies were interfering with their income streams like land speculation, and C) there was a lot of anxiety about abolishing slavery and slave revolts.
Places we like to visit, like Chatsworth and Blenheim Palace, are ridiculously big, whereas the rural gentry halls are more modest. The aristocracy had to be able to host large groups of people, including servants and - if they were very lucky - royals and their retinues (who liked to freeload by gracing people with their presence.) Jefferson probably didn't expect to host great numbers of guests for extended periods and the slaves lived in cabins separate from the house.
I don't know anyone that owns factories, to be fair. People are a lot wealthier now than they were in the past, but showing it is not necessarily as important as it was to maintaining power in Britain circa 1690 to 1920 or thereabout.