Home long thought to beMonroe’s turns out to be his guest house

Ex-president didn’t live in Va. farmhouse

For decades, a modest farmhouse in central Virginia was thought to be what remained of President James Monroe’s home in Charlottesville. It turns out, historianswere wrong.

New evidence suggests the building that has long been billed as the home that the Founding Father lived in beginning in 1799 was actually a guest house Monroe built about two decades later. It ’s now believed the entirety of Monroe’s real home was lost in a fire years after he sold the property.

“It was just sort of a historical mix-up,” said Sara Bon-Harper, executive director of James Monroe’s Highland, which is owned and operated by the College ofWilliam& Mary.

As far back as 1885, newspaper accounts suggested the home at Highlandwas a wing of Monroe’s original residence that survived a fire in the mid-1800s, BonHarper said. The idea was accepted by scholars and passed down for generations.

But something didn’t quite add up. The home includes details that became popular years after Monroe supposedly built it. So researchers recently got to work to see if they could confirm their suspicions.

Dendrochronology — a method of dating trees — was performed on pieces of the home, and the wood was found to have been cut around 1818, BonHarper said. That matched with a letter Monroe sent to his son-in-law around that time that mentioned a small home he built for visitors to Highland.

Historians hope the discovery will help people better understand the fifth president and former Virginia governor. The small, simple building that was thought to be his residence didn’t seem to fit a man of his importance.

“It was just sort of a historical mix-up.”

Sara Bon-Harper, executive director of JamesMonroe’s Highland, owned and operated by the College ofWilliam & Mary