Monroe’s estate worth a return visit

Dennis Bigelow Fluvanna County
Published: July 17, 2008

On the day I accessed The Daily Progress’ July 8 editorial (“Bureaucratic nightmare”), the Web site included a previous week’s Question of the Week of 452 respondents who were asked to name “their favorite presidential estates,” with a bar graph response of 49 percent Monticello, 48 percent Montpe-lier and 2 percent Ash Lawn-Highland.

Putting aside that the question is like asking someone to compare Versailles and Windsor Castle with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Hyde Park, the poll does not disclose the possibility that 19 percent of that 2 percent that gave Ash Lawn-Highland the nod might have been board members from Monticello and Montpelier, with the additional possibility that 27 percent of those same board members could have grandchildren, 62 percent of whom would have selected Monroe’s mountain, all of which, of course, carries a statistical margin of error of not more than 1-3.5 percent. Statistical foolishness, yes, but so are some polls.

President Monroe’s modest “Cabin Castle” — as he called Highland, later Ash Lawn-Highland — never attempted to compete with Jefferson’s Mont-icello or Madison’s Montpelier — except in the spring pea contest.

It didn’t have to.

James Madison was probably Col. Monroe’s first overnight guest when “Highland” was built in 1799. Thomas Jefferson visited his chosen neighbor Monroe happily over nearly a quarter of a century. Their vote (and you can’t ignore the weightiness of such endorsements from the Father of the Constitution and the Father of our Political Liberty) is that Highland was a great place to crash, have a good meal and keep company with another founding president and his wife, Elizabeth, who was world-renowned for her beauty and resourcefulness in saving the lives in Paris of the Marquis de Lafayette’s wife and pamphleteer Thomas Paine.

Jefferson said to Madison of Monroe: “A better man there cannot be.”

Perhaps a better question from The Progress would have been to have asked: “After your reverence for Monticello and Montpelier, is there a place in your presidential affections for Ash Lawn-Highland?”  No need to take another poll. Thousands of return visitors have given us their answer.