Poplar Forest was Thomas Jefferson's plantation and plantation house in what is now Forest, Virginia, near Lynchburg. He designed it and treated it as a private retreat, working on it from 1806 until his death 20 years later. "It is the most valuable of my possessions," Jefferson once wrote a correspondent. Although he had intended it for his youngest daughter Mary Jefferson Eppes and her family, she died at age 26. He entrusted it to her only surviving son Francis W. Eppes.
Known as the architect of such buildings as Monticello, the University of Virginia, and the Virginia State Capitol, Jefferson built the more remote and lesser-known Poplar Forest as a place to escape the hordes of visitors at Monticello and seek the "solitude of a hermit." It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1970. It is operated as an historic house museum.
Read more about Poplar Forest: History, Preservation
Famous quotes containing the words poplar and/or forest:
“Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaf and blood at the root
Black bodies swingin’ in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin’ in the poplar trees.”
—Billie Holiday [Eleanor Fagan] (1915–1959)
“It is as when a migrating army of mice girdles a forest of pines. The chopper fells trees from the same motive that the mouse gnaws them,—to get his living. You tell me that he has a more interesting family than the mouse. That is as it happens.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)