ABSTRACT
T. Jefferson was well known among his political colleagues in Virginia as an enthusiastic student of architecture. When it was decided by the legislature to vacate the colonial buildings at Williamsburg in favor of a new location, closer to the hinterlands, up river at Richmond, Jefferson, then in Paris, was asked to develop a design. There is at Nismes in the South of France a building, called the Maison Quarrae, erected in the time of the Caesars, and which is allowed without contradiction to be the most perfect and precious remain of antiquity in existence. The architect having been much busied, and knowing that this was all which would be necessary in the beginning, has not yet finished the Sections of the building. To Jefferson the philosophical content of public education and the buildings in which that instruction was given were intimately interconnected.
