Charlottesville in Virginia

6 February 2023 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, UNESCO World Heritage Reading Time:  10 minutes

Confederate Memorial on Court Square © Bob Mical/cc-by-3.0

Confederate Memorial on Court Square © Bob Mical/cc-by-3.0

Charlottesville, colloquially known as C’ville, is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia, United States. It is the county seat of Albemarle County, which surrounds the city, though the two are separate legal entities. It is named after Queen Charlotte, wife of George III. At the 2020 census, the population was 46,553. The Bureau of Economic Analysis combines the City of Charlottesville with Albemarle County for statistical purposes, bringing its population to approximately 150,000. Charlottesville is the heart of the Charlottesville metropolitan area, which includes Albemarle, Buckingham, Fluvanna, Greene, and Nelson counties.   read more…

Fort Jefferson on Garden Key

8 April 2015 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, Miami / South Florida, Palaces, Castles, Manors, Parks Reading Time:  8 minutes

Fort Jefferson © U.S. National Park Service

Fort Jefferson © U.S. National Park Service

Fort Jefferson is a massive but unfinished coastal fortress. It is the largest masonry structure in the Americas, and is composed of over 16 million bricks. The Dry Tortugas are part of Monroe County. The fort is located on Garden Key in the lower Florida Keys within the Dry Tortugas National Park, about 70 miles (110 km) west of the island of Key West. A series of engineering studies and bureaucratic delays consumed 17 years, but the construction of Fort Jefferson (named after the third President, Thomas Jefferson) was finally begun on Garden Key in 1846. The new fort would be built so that the existing Garden Key lighthouse and the lighthouse keeper’s cottage would be contained within the walls of the fort. The lighthouse would continue to serve a vital function in guiding ships through the waters of the Dry Tortugas Islands until the current metal light tower was installed atop an adjacent wall of the fort in 1876. The original brick lighthouse tower was taken down in 1877.   read more…

Monticello in Virginia

4 October 2014 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, UNESCO World Heritage Reading Time:  6 minutes

Monticello © Sudhindra/cc-by-sa-3.0

Monticello © Sudhindra/cc-by-sa-3.0

Monticello was the primary plantation of Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, who, after inheriting quite a large amount of land from his father, started building Monticello when he was twenty-six years old. Located just outside Charlottesville, Virginia, in the Piedmont region, the plantation was originally 5,000 acres (2,000 ha), with extensive cultivation of tobacco and mixed crops, with labor by slaves. What started as a mainly tobacco plantation switched over to a wheat plantation later in Jefferson’s life.   read more…

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