James Madison's Montpelier We the People Spring 2013 | Page 7

We The People
7
FEATURED EXHIBIT

Celebrate the 5th Anniversary of the Restoration of Montpelier.
Join us on Constitution Day – Saturday, September 21.

Celebrate the Restoration
Montpelier marked the completion of the architectural restoration
of President Madison’s lifelong home on September 17, 2008. As
recent visitors to the mansion have seen firsthand, the intervening
five years have transformed formerly empty rooms into refurnished
spaces that help bring James and Dolley’s home to life.
Since 2008, the Montpelier Research Database, a relational tool
for sorting contextual historical research, has grown to more than
29,000 documents and 5,000 objects associated with Montpelier.
Our team of historians, archaeologists, and scholars have uncovered artifacts and discovered detailed diaries, letters, and accounts
in repositories and private collections around the globe. This
information paints a much clearer and more vivid portrait of life at
Montpelier in the early nineteenth century, allowing us to restore
the mansion interiors with precision and care. Most importantly, the
interior restoration allows our visitors to better experience the home
of James and Dolley Madison and explore the lives of the many
individuals who lived and worked on the estate.
In 2013, Montpelier will embark on its most important and ambitious interior restoration project — the restoration of James Madison’s “Old Library,” the likely study in which he researched ancient
and modern governments and shaped the structure of the young
nation by preparing notes that formed the basis of the Virginia Plan.
Recalling the Madisons during their retirement, niece Mary Cutts
described a home filled with library spaces. “Enter the library,”
she wrote of an upstairs chamber, “plain cases not only round the
room, but in the middle with just sufficient room to pass between,
these cases were filled with books, pamphlets, papers, all, every
thing of interest to our country before and since the Revolution...”
Soon, we hope visitors will walk through such a library “filled with
books” and leave Montpelier filled with knowledge and inspiration.

Notes on Tour to Lakes in 1791, James Madison.
LMF2013.1.1 / Courtesy of Mr. J. Robert Maguire.

FOUNDING
FRIENDSHIP
On May 21, 1791, James Madison and Thomas
Jefferson departed from Dorothy Elsworth’s
New York City boarding house for a monthlong journey through New England and upstate
New York. Contemporaries criticized the trip
as politically motivated, fearing the pair would
promote opposition to Hamiltonian economic
policies gaining popularity in the Washington
administration. The content of Madison’s travel
journals, now on display at the Grills Gallery in
the Visitor Center, suggests otherwise.
Both men recorded extensive notes on
local economies, the natural landscape, and
crop cultivation in New England, describing
“mountainous country” that “occasionally
presents a very cultivated aspect.” Madison’s
self-proclaimed objectives for the tour were
simple: “health recreation & curiosity.” Despite
a bilious attack brought on by the unseasonably
warm weather, Jefferson proclaimed that
Madison’s “journey with me to the lakes placed
him in better health than I have seen him.”
The Founding Friendship exhibit will run
through the end of June.