148 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING 
it was not infrequently said that Thomas Jefferson was 
the first American who had consulted the fine arts to 
know how he should shelter himself from the weather. 
It is indeed a beautiful structure. 
His scheme of distributing offices and servants’ quar¬ 
ters did away entirely with the customary line or lines 
of “dependent houses,” flanking the Mansion House; 
and in this respect as well as in many others, Mon- 
ticello is entirely different from other southern estates. 
Beneath the house and partly forming its terraces were 
all these features—the kitchen and “rooms for all sorts 
of purposes,” the servants’ rooms on one side, “warm 
in winter and cool in summer,” rooms for vegetables, 
fruit, cider and wood; and cellars, ice-houses and cis¬ 
terns, The hilltop location made this arrangement 
possible and practical, where a level site would have 
precluded it. 
According to the superintendent at that time, the 
vegetable garden was made while Jefferson was Presi¬ 
dent; but this must have been a new or a second 
vegetable garden, for the place could hardly have been 
without one all the years of his occupancy until his 
election in 1801. This garden was a work of much 
labor, for the rock had to be blown out for the walls 
of the different terraces and earth had then to be 
brought in to nourish the plants. But it was a fine 
garden, once it was finished, and delicious fruits and 
