ABSTRACT
The Lawn was the product of the imagination of America’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, in the Age of Enlightenment. In an era which aspired to replace theocracy and oligarchy with reason and egalitarianism, Jefferson believed that the only means by which the nation’s newly gained democracy could be upheld was through an educated populace. Far ahead of his contemporaries, he advanced that the responsibility for attaining this lay with the government. Not content with merely theorising, he set about realising a state-funded institution on the outskirts of Charlottesville, Virginia.2
