the executive director of james monroe's home, highland, and she has been the executive director there since 2012. i see that the college of william and mary has moved into their backyard because highland is a department of the college of william and mary. prior to assuming the leadership at highland, she worked as archaeological research manager at monticello down the road from 1999-2012, so she has been on that road for a long time. when i was in law school, i lived on brown mountain, so i know the area very well. she earned her ba magna cum laude from the university of arizona, then headed east and did her phd at the university of north carolina chapel hill, and she has also taught at chapel hill in the university of virginia, so we are delighted this afternoon to have sara bon-harper, executive director of highland. [applause] sara bon-harper: what a warm welcome. thank you. it is a pleasure to be here and a pleasure to be on this lineup and a group that knows so much about monroe. i am glad to be here and glad to be finding out there is always something new in history, and that is what we will talk about today. everybody hold your breath. james monroe's highland is the current name for the property. about a year ago, we reclaimed that historic name for the site. james monroe after dithering for some time decided he would name his property highland, and that is what he called it. the name, ashlawn, was a later name for the property, a 19th-century name, and my predecessor as executive director there had the foresight highland back in, so the ashlawn highland name existed for a while, and we came out on the other side of that and in april last year reclaimed the historic name. that is a signal of our clear -- munro --ro monroe and his legacy and the messages we can share about that, so are sure you a little bit of the history there going through private ownership, and coming out today as james monroe's highland. james monroe's architecture there and in fact his legacy has been a little obscure it on the site based on the presence of a larger later house. this is an 1870's house built by the massey family, the reverend john e. massey was there for quite some time, and this victorian-style house was what people pictured for quite some time. it never really had been confused with monroe's house, don't believe that but it did , its cure the old house for some time. the monroe part of the house was much smaller. you sort of have to. around the edge to encounter it. portion.is the edge we had long understood that white building was just a part of the original main house. the insurance documents that i from 1800-1809 and 1816, the drawings here, then transcribed here, show two wings, two rectangles together, are the two portions, and we get some good description, and it was clear that the whole house was not preserved, and what you visited at ashlawn or ashlawn highland was not the whole story. were in is where we understanding, and i will acknowledge here as you are puzzling about how this makes sense, there is a discrepancy, whether the smaller wing here is on the right or the left. this is of is seen not just a clear mixup of north and south. in fact, this is the only one that gives you north and the south on the larger document. it really is, they have them on so there isdes, internal inconsistency in this period of insurance documents. in these old insurance documents, one of the things i did not care about was the exact way out of the house. one of the things they did care about, these old insurance documents, they cared about the material, what was it made of? why do you suppose they cared about what materials it was? because of fire. you all know that. they cared about how far it was from other buildings, right? why do you think they cared about that? fire, right? if one caught on fire, the other gets lost. so those are the things that mattered. fire, cost of rebuilding, general size. i am not overly concerned with the discrepancy between 34 by 18 feet or 34 by 16 feet. in the pacing it off, probably the guy was taller who pasted it off in 1809, right? they are referring to the same building, but that is some of the historical information we had. so for a good long period of time up to last year, this building here was considered the smaller of those two wings, and the interpretation you would be presented was that the other part of the house was destroyed by fire, but that this was the smaller wing of james monroe's main house, which he moved into in 1799. so last year we were able to , reveal the results of our research, which we had been doing, and here where we take our presidential history very seriously. it made the news, so i offer you a smattering of the headlines from the various news media that did independent stories on the announcement. really the announcement was the small house is james monroe's presidential guesthouse. in his words, a house for lodgers, ok? and, that the main house was actually a beautifully preserved set of archaeological remains in the front yard of that victorian-style, 1870's house. that was our announcement on april 28 last year. ok, so this changes things quite a bit. it is a fabulous opportunity from my vantage point of not just reinterpreting the site, but also reinterpreting james monroe, ok? i will say having made that bold , claim, i will spend much of my time in the next little bit talking about the discovery and how we came to conclude what we concluded. i will bring you along in that story, therefore when you go forth on monday morning, people ask you what you learned of the weekend, you can talk about this discovery. at the end, i will talk a little bit about what we knew about james monroe and where this points us. ok, this is another perspective, the archaeological site off of the main house is right in here. there is that smaller piece that we thought was that small wing, which we now understand was james monroe's guesthouse and the intervening 1870's buildings that stand in the way. so how did we get from this little vernacular building being interpreted as james monroe's house to where we are today? let's back up and talk about how we thought that was the wing of the main house. from around 1930 or just before here in this picture. all right, the idea that this small house was the wing of the main house was not at all new, and i offer this 1885 newspaper clipping here, and it says the main building, talking about ashlawn, right? ashlawn, the main building is new the old monroe house nearly , destroyed by fire, there remains a wing of the president's home, ok? so that is an old case. i can contrast that with the 1901 article of the massey obituary that says the old presidents house was destroyed and a new house has been built in its place. so both stories existed for some time, and there was certainly an amount of confusion, and we don't know really which of the previous owners during this long history, what they believed and what exactly their understanding of the house was, because certainly it does have, especially in the 19th century, through a series of ownerships, and the story gets a little modeled -- muddled. so let's fast-forward to the college of william and mary and jay winston john, the last private owner dies, and the college inherits the property. what do they do? among their first moves is to conduct a tripartite set of research. the three prongs are historical documentation, where the reigning monroe biographer comes along and says, yes, monroe road from highland. we see that on lots of letters, and in fact, highland was his property. we can see that in the title search. it is all good. it was his property, and he lived there. we have architectural history, , a greatton greg architect, did a lot of historical work around the state and in our area, looked at it , all the nooks and crannies and said there are no discrepancies between that set of insurance documents and any other records, and the building present today. it is all good. and the final one was archaeological research, and this is a fuzzy image of a couple of people digging in a crawlspace of that yellow house. that is a bit more heroic than the archaeology i like to do, a spot less than three feet tall. they, archaeologists, always say preliminarye results, and here are the things you should do in addition, dig here, here, here, and here. every archaeology report does that. it is never done. the archaeology comes in and they say most that we however, and the thing i fixated on when i came on board their in 2012 was that they could not really put their finger on the remains of the other wing, ok? this is supposed to be an attached wing, but they cannot -- could not say the wing was on the side or that side because they could not find it, and the only thing that made me go down in the same crawlspace was looking for that wall, and i did in fact go down there, and i don't have immediate plans to go again, but there were three waste holders in their that suggested this could be the remnants of my wall. i was looking with the images in the report, and when i went down there, i did not really think so. i wasn't convinced enough to say, we know where that other wing is, because if you have a two-wing building, the wing does not totally disappear. it has to be somewhere. however, in 1976, the announcement yes, this was validated. yes, it is authenticated as james monroe's home and we are good to go. we in the -- we understand this as james monroe's home. that due diligence, and i do support that. evidence today did support that claim. you know, sometimes people say to me, well, how come they did not figure at out earlier? i don't think historians like that. i think when we make a discovery it is what evidence did feature to ask a different question or look at the evidence in a different light, and that is where i head with this research. so, in looking at this building and considering the evidence from the historical side, the architectural side, and the archaeological side, you know, there is some expression and i never quite get it right, if you are a hammer, all problems look like a nail. is that an expression? when you are an archaeologist, i think all problems probably require a shovel. can you get my parallel there that i am aiming for? well, starting about three years ago now, it took us a couple of years to do this research, we shovel testing pits, an individual hole in the ground, a foot in diameter for a shovel head to fitting comfortably. we ended up digging shovel tests all around the plantation. the areas that said dig here, here, and here, they wanted us to dig here, here, here, and here, so we started with those areas, but we ended up taking all the way around, digging in a complete coverage even in a you can find out the things you don't know you're looking for, right? that is not the way to discover new things. so what we found was in this area right here. i wanted to highlight it in the shape that the house site eventually ends up being so you can imagine that on the property, on the layout, and so what do we find? digging these little stp's, we found a bunch of brick, some of it burned, a bunch of glass, and reallyburned badly melted, we found nails by the bucketful, lots and lots of nails, mortar, wall plaster, small fines such as ceramics, evidence of furnishings. really sense that building had a sense that building had been nearby. we also found in one of the shovel test, something that almost never happens, what turned out later to be a stone feature, and he can't really tell because it was only a foot in diameter, so we knew there was enough from the movable objects, such as the nails, glass, and bricks, and from these stones, they were pretty suggestive that we should dig more, and we dug with a specific idea of saying, we know that there is a building somewhere that was destroyed that contributes to these objects. and, we need to know whether the building stood here in this spot or whether it was pushed over from somewhere nearby, and that was really a first big question, where was this building? was it here? and that is a yes or no question. archaeologists are rarely so lucky. from our first season, this indicates here burned timbers. i think of them as burned floor planks. i don't have enough evidence to really say that. as an archaeologist i would , caution against making the conclusion. as storyteller in chief, right there where they fell, this is awaiting further excavation, but there is more. the base of a chimney, again, we are below the floor level, probably in the part of the house that had not have a c ellar. we had a reference to a stone cellar and those insurance documents. the cellar is back here, and that is part of a nice, hefty chimney base below the floor level. we have the northeastern corner. some of the stones had been robbed. this is a good corner. you have that northeastern corner with the wall line coming up that way. and we have really nicely preserved foundations just below the ground surface. they were there waiting the whole time. i think probably everyone understands how unusual this is on all kinds of counts. let's start with the most mundane. most historic sites that are still occupied and used in various ways, the remains have been dug up and put back a whole bunch of times, right? utilities are the big culprit, but this is really unusual. it is beautifully preserved. that is so intact it is remarkable. the other thing, in really hashing this out and saying, when you lose a president house -- president's house and rediscover it, how does it usually happen? this is a fairly unusual case so we are letting that sink in for a second. and how do we make sense of it and how to we make sure that this is the 1799 house, and that isn't, ok?g house that is what you should all be saying, and you should be skeptical at this moment and i will till you. the standing house, right, at the same time or even just before, we set about doing some architectural history, and we had good and close collaboration, and still have come up with our friends from colonial williamsburg some of the architectural historians who deeply understand virginia architecture, and we had a stem to stern the house, point out all the features, make a full fabrics inventory and record what we knew about the house. we did find some surprises, like here. recognizeme of you these as circular saw marks, the the kind of sawing technology that only came into being in the -- our part of virginia in the 1850's, ok? and this part was meant to be a fragment of that 1799 house. somebody had to point that out to me, but then after, i could see it microscopically. i could see it with my own eyes that yes, indeed, those are circular saw marks, so we had to change our interpretation there have this little piece, the piece that joined this fragment with the later 1870's house, and so that peace we took off-line as monroe period rooms a couple of years ago, and that is the room you see here with that fabulous wallpaper, and interpreted as the drawing room for a long time, and we now understand that an 1850's edition, probably late 1850's, and that it was added when the little piece, the house for lodgers, was the only house standing there. they just needed a little bit more space, a kitchen and this room is how i understand that. and otherwise, i got that kind of list of things that don't add up, right? the brick bond there is a little bit late for being 1799, the type of hinges, the type of molding, all of these things lead our friends, the architectural historians, to say it looks like you have a building from the first quarter of the 19th century, and just because i can tell me about , this. the 1799 work -- if you squint, it's like the first quarter of the 19th century. the response really was coming to know, monroe may have been precocious in some things. architecture does not seem to be one of them. the real answer to give you an absolute date, not a relative date, an actual real date with numbers, is tree ring dating. that was the recommendation from the architectural historians who said it really looks like first quarter of the 19th century. it looks like teens or 20's really, and that is not 1799. i am quantitative enough to be able to tell you that. so i assume that some people in this group know a lot about tree ring dating and may have had interesting houses rated as -- dated as such, but for those who haven't or don't, let me give you the really brief rundown. really starting with the basic premise, ok? a tree puts on a growth ring every year of its life starting at the center and so each of these rings represents a year of growth until the last year it was cut down. for example, if the year is 1841 and you cut down a tree, how you can count back to the center, all right? that is the premise. and so each of those readings on a tree gets measured in a really detailed way to form a pattern, and the pattern is created by the regional growth conditions, such as water and sunlight, temperature -- all the things that influence how a tree grows and how much growth it can put on in that particular year, and so that starts -- you start with the tree you cut down today and you establish that pattern, the thick and thin rings. you think of thin, thin, thin, medium ones, thick ones, really thick, and then going back they -- then you can essentially graph those measurements of each of the rings, then you start going back with older and older trees and use over lapping examples to bring them back. until eventually maybe you are using trees that were harvested many years ago, such as from a waterlogged deposit where they have not rotted, so you can get the whole sequence for a region. it has to be done by the species of tree and by the region, and it has to be established before you start your study. so, those are the premises. so, we call in the experts, go around, poking around, looking around in all of the different phases of the house and looking for those exterior growth rings, and this is what we call bark edge, the exterior portion of the tree, that rounded part. i tell you what, you will never go to lowe's again nca to buy -- again anddge by 4.2 it is rarer than it used to be, but in those days they were very parsimonious with their use of trees they harvested, so there were lots of edges, so you find them frequently enough to do that. you have to start with that to say that is the cutting date, that outside ring, ok? we sample the different phases and this is what the sampling looks like with a hollow core drill, and you pull a sample out and it looks something like that, and that is what would be polished and measured, and those measurements graphed, ok? so, it is one of these phone calls you don't forget, when the specialist calls you back and says, i have some dates on the main structure, and you hold your breath. he said, 1818, which again is not the same as 1799 when we know from a letter that monroe is moving in in november 1799, ok? and those measurements are from the rafters, so again, we need to be really sure of this effort going to go change things and so do rafters ever get replaced? i have lived through some hurricanes. would a chimney fire require that? is pull off some clapboards we get another round, pulled off some clapboards and were very lucky again, something smiling on us, and found more -- i recognize the lighting is such that you can't see too well, but moorpark edge at the corner post, and that made me feel more solid. we will take a set of those and measure those as well. they came out to 1818. got this is the , start of the victorian-style house here. we have this core. we have this part with the circular saw marks. this is a shed addition to the north side. we saw that in the 1930 photo. this is the core of the house that we really want to know if it is the other wing or something else. we get the wood that was harvested between the spring of 1815 and the winter of 1818. the reuse temper here that we saw again by observing were harvested earlier. we know, because of their condition and how it leans on the main part of the house, that it has to be constructed after 1818. postdates mantra monroe.eso - the one with the circular saw postdates the winter of 19 -- 1856 and 1857. that fits well with circular sawing and that's construction phase there. that is one of the reasons why that was built on -- to make enough room here and that's predates that. what do we make of this? monroe's and writing is such an wonderful thing. this is a letter from james monroe to his son george hay. september 6, 1818. there's a lot of good things in the letter. he talks about some changes and he talks about some changes in the rooms where the servants lodged. then he says, "i have a new house with two rooms, framed just below the present one for lodgers." it will be closed in while here and finish before i return. this is done by a carpenter. he talks about an enslaved carpenter that he bought for $450. they spurred much a part to lori's work. this is likely that this is peter malley read -- peter malley that built the guest house. so there is an explanation. , it is, in fact, house for lodgers. if it's two rooms. room -- 2andard, to room lobby entrance dependency building from a plantation. we see this house format in a lot of places. the nearest example that i know of, is 2.5 miles away from -- away from highland to monticello. it's not a main house, a master residence. it is a dependency building. so, what we have today, is we have the outline as much as we can of the foundations that we found. this is that the back area where you have the joint in here. this is the cellar area. we have outlined to that on the ground with of these paving stones so people can get the gist of it. what is our future? our future is to mount a large and extended campaign of archaeology to be able to open up big enough areas to understand. cellar, excavate that for example, until we can have that open for a long enough. to open up wide, make it safe, and make a scientifically valid entry point into that cellar. we are in an amazing phase of discovery at that point. what about our interpretation of james monroe? we have his presidential guesthouse, which i think is for the first calendar year of his presidency, 1818. every time he would go to highland, i imagine he would have more and more guests. the visitors coming, either with him while he is there. he would have been doing business as president while he was there and needed that extra space for housing his guests and visitors. monroees it say about himself to really reinvention this property. reinvision this property. i think that the state of the house at highland has contributed, and probably erroneously, to an understanding of monroe as just coming out of the field with clots of dirt stuck to his boots, not terribly ambitious and not terribly cerebral. right? it is ok to say that now that we can point to other evidence and the assembled group has heard evidence to the contrary today, but to retroactively understand the house that's we thought was a part of monroe's main house. even if we said this was a part of his main house, what you saw in front of you was this dependency building. that certainly colored perspective. we have already talked about monroe's boyhood. 1758, butn born in let's take that apart a little bit. our eyes indicate probably the housell actually size compared to similar houses of that time is above average for a house size in westmoreland county at that time. the amount of property that his parents owned, they owned about 250 acres at the time of his first. -- his birth. it was about 350 by the time he was selling his parent's estate after his death. it was 550 acres. 550 acres, at the time, is a considerably significant property size. some of the cases, using the earliest records available, put it at 62nd percentile and a some put it higher than that. so we are not talking a , lower-class man. let's talk about monroe's education. we mentioned, i think this morning, archibald academy where monroe was placed there by his father. this was a place where the young men of the colony could be prepared for a life in public service as evidence by , john marshall. it was not insignificant. we don't know whether the monroe had to send their eldest son to the school. it was the parent's choice. the other brothers and his sister, we don't know what kind of education they had. whether it was because the brothers went or not to school, i don't think we know that. it might have to do more with their eventual success in life or night and what we have retroactively studied about them . and then, of course when the , monroe parents die, he goes off to william and mary to study with his maternal uncle. , joseph jones. to think about monroe's parents for a little bit, it is the mother's family has a little more prestige and the father's has land. nroe, was a spence mo joiner or carpenter. his inventory shows a set of implements, tools, and furnishings in the process of completion. the products needed to finish those things, and he had been apprenticed and his own youth, at about the age , and then ininer his adult life, he also accepted apprentices up to the time of his death. so he was active in his craft, but he was also present in some of the historical records as a or gentleman.nt it seems like, for that time and place, it was not unusual for a gentleman to also have some kind of craft provision. especially if the gentleman's acreage was poorly drained and not terribly productive agriculturally. we see a middling or upper and middling planters. if we put that in perspective, for example, alex and bell's out of middling planters lisa county, where the essence is investing in the means of production rather than delete monroes sort of fit into that. if we look at the jefferson's of randall side we see the , difference there, where we don't see a lot of elite goods at the monroe birthplace. we see it more means of production. i'm going to come down and say, middling planters, but, on the upper level of middling. monroe was not right out of the field as a child. he was well educated and prepared for the life that he eventually assumed. i'm going to go on record and say, i think we see an ambitious young man. if you look at his aesthetic, we have the joy of looking at this afternoon at oak hill, this is a man that new where he wanted to go -- knew where he wanted to go and in fact ended up there. my take on it is, let's reconsider monroe and highland for sure. consider somebody that had a good vision, not just of the country and where the country should go, but of himself, his abilities and his career trajectory. so, thanks and i will take questions. [applause] sara bon-harper: yes, sir? >> they said if you take this path, you can see jefferson county, and when we got there, they said you can't see it as well, but we will cut down some of the trees and make it more visible. are they going to make it -- [inaudible] sara bon-harper: that is a complicated question. i don't know of any previous plans to cut down trees there. certainly, the visibility of the monticello main house from highland what have to do with which trees were standing at which particular point. whether it is season or what stage of timbering. as far as our plans to cut down trees, we don't have any specific ones right now. we have just installed rustic trails on a property that was a real think of old boy scout trails. there has been musing about whether acreage should be cleared, but there are no immediate plans for that. >> [inaudible] sara bon-harper: it is right on the edge. you can catch a glimpse of it. >> [inaudible] two views -- to use monroe's words, the 1799 house -- the guesthouse is just below the present one relative. they are almost in the same spot. they are separated by not even 50 feet. it is the same kind of spot. yes. yes, sir? >> [inaudible] sara bon-harper: it was framed the cellar.one in the square print that's the square foot of the footprint was 17 by 30 at the end of the day so that is a significant size house for the time and if you think of usable living space, have children's rooms of top and then the kitchen and the storage spaces below. it was a significant house. it was not a two room dependency. >> [inaudible] sara bon-harper: we have not attempted that yet. that it is certainly in the plan. we feel we need to do a little more architectural history to get a good perspective. we have made some, two steps past that floor plans of what it might have looked like. i will go over there first. >> do we know who had the house after that and do we know when it burned? sara bon-harper: those are good questions. monroe sold the core of his property, around 900 acres, july 1, 1826 to edward o. goodwin. they were separated, which makes the title search complicated. yes, we have done the chain of title, we have the whole list of later owners, and if we don't have it on our website i'm glad to talk to you and share that research. that work is all been done and we know all the later owners. there is something funny that happens in the tax records in the 1830's. in the late 1850's, the one -- the one over one addition was put on. i am still interpreting based on the evidence, but not definitively, that the house burned between those two events. your target would be, if you are going to do a box plot and just -- guess the probabilities, i would guess in the 1840's. there is room for the late 1830's and early 1850's, but somewhere between that time. so that you know i'm still making up a preliminary notation. >> [inaudible] sara bon-harper: i agree. 1999, i referenced a public graduate intern and she looked and looked for evidence and did not find it. i had an intern later in 15 years, and we scoured the heck out of all the databases we could find. still nothing. attic. it is in an there are newspapers in somebody's attic in a 1970's scrapbook somewhere. if you want to go home early and looked i , will not hold it against you. someone will come forward with that. if he was living, it would have been bigger. it has to be in some newspaper somewhere. preservation of the newspapers ofm that period are sort spotty. i will go to this lady in the back and come back to you. >> [inaudible] sara bon-harper: yes, i started that and heidi provided a list of letter dates and i'm hoping to go back and see where he was writing from during fall the times. i have not completed that research yet, but that it's a question i want to know also. i would be happy to come and tell you. yep? i will be happy to come and tell you. >> [inaudible] sara bon-harper: yes. >> [inaudible] yes, and sortr: of yes. again, i will note my colleagues amazing works that have done the groundbreaking works establishing all of the document referencing. the community tends to be shuffled back and forth between highland and oak hill for a good couple decades there, and the population of one goes up and down. i will give you an example. in 1810, at highland, monroe was recorded as having possession of 49 sold. 49 ranks him at 15th in slaveowners. the majority of those slaveowners have 100 or fewer. there are only two slaveowners who have 100 or more slaves in that county of the 1810. the highest was 147 and that was thomas jefferson. >> [inaudible] sara bon-harper: we have a reconstructed quarter that is in the core. that is based in part on some archaeological evidence. we have some archaeological evidence of another quarter. i'm so glad you asked this. that is the reconstructed quarter on the screen here. -- in the last couple of years, we done shovelt and testing all across the field. i suspect, and this is in the hypothesis space, that there was a whole line of buildings that marched across the landscape here. that continued and there were more quarters here. this road, we have discovered glee --ogy archaeologically is post-monroe, later 19th century. that is out of the question, and this service yard, here, probably was not bounded by the road. that leaves further strength to my hypothesis that there were additional quarters here. there are also probably outflank orders walking to and from the farm and work locations. probably closer to the worksites were also quarters. yes, sir? >> did he have any mills? sara bon-harper: you had to mills -- 2 mills. >> [inaudible] sara bon-harper: it is known, generally, where they are. i would not be the person to walk you to the spot and show you. don't believe me if i take you for a walk to do that. [laughter] >> one of the headbangers there at that time? sara bon-harper: i -- talking about problems was a very generous thing to do. sara bon-harper: it was not a hostile takeover. i would defer any number of the historians in the audience. did you want to -- >> the person who engineer was john jacob astor. he was on the board of governors and i think it was for monroefriendship than anything else to help them -- him resolve his problems and consolidate all the debt. sara bon-harper: thank you. or they would tiling -- wood tiling or a mix? sara bon-harper: the slave titles that i am more familiar with from this time and place, are probably still construction. a wooden beam laid on the ground surface. this makes them very hard to discover archaeologically. later, you see more solid foundations. you see the move toward raised within the whole movement in the 1830's and 1840's with sanitation and hygiene. it is a little less autonomy for enslaved people. buck, they are raised later on the pilings, stone pilings, or stone foundation and hillsides will also cause he to have stone pilings on one side. does that help? >> [inaudible] sara bon-harper: this little building -- i know you can't really see with the granularity where you are. that is a smoke house and it will be the property. it was likely moved to that location at some point. no, we have not done chronology on that. this one is an overseer house that may or made not have been used as a slave quarter. there is almost all -- there is almost no architectural distinction of the two. i see evidence of rebuilding around the foundation of that as well. overseers have said to be original. i will diebold jesus -- divulge this -- original plan, when investigating the main house got so complicated that we ended up using all of our research funds in that campaign. this was a reconstruction. in 1985 and 1986. i know i am- probably pushing on time. >> we will take one more. >> what was going on in james monroe's life in 1799 that might have helped construction? sara bon-harper: in 1793, he purchased the property and he was then living at monroe hill which is now on the property of the university of virginia. monroe hill was smaller and it -- apparently it wasn't that good of farmland, and what later became highland, was a larger parcel. it was bought as part of the original land-grant and it was adjoining thomas jefferson's monticello. better agricultural land, bigger plots, and close to his friend and mentor, thomas jefferson. he went off to france as a minister to france and in the mid-1790's, was there and was -- sort of gave jefferson oversight the sighting of my buildings as he says. the placement of the buildings and choices of where things will go. there are nice letters back and forth. he buys nails from jefferson starting in 1796. the piece that i talk about in the newspaper article that one of you no doubt has in your collection, the other thing that is about to show up, any day, in the u.s. postal service is the model that monroe sent to jefferson from france. carriercture the mail with his paper wrap they're . going to show up one day and hand that to me. i'm positive. less inn was more or charge and he was moving from a smaller property to the bigger house in 1799. >> [inaudible] [laughter] sara bon-harper: that is a good point. i will go home and do that. thank you very much. 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