ABSTRACT
Thomas Jefferson's ideas about the fundamental value of family farms in rural communities are still fondly remembered today. His father was the one of the first settlers in Albermarle County in southwest Virginia. Thomas was born in 1743, and when his father died in 1757, he was left 2000 hectares of land, to which he later added another 2000 hectares. After being elected as representative of Albermarle at the age of 26, he then moved to Monticello, where he built a house on a wooded summit, which he said had a ‘splendid panorama of nature, waves of forest, rolling hills and deep valleys, sharply edged to the west, against the noble background of the Blue Ridge’. He saw in the environment around him ‘an immensity of land courting the industry of the husbandman’, and believed farming was an essential part of a virtuous way of life, thus securing dignity and independence.
