Beyond Monticello: Morven

After presenting the Monticello Connectivity report, people asked what I was planning to do next. My answer was often, “Hopefully something like this.” That wish received a nice down-payment when the UVa Foundation’s Morven hired me to work with their staff and two Architecture School interns to study the feasibility of trails at (or to) Morven. Morven borders James Monroe’s Highland and is about two miles from Monticello. There is growing interest in a trail connecting the historic sites, which would vastly extend the connected network we are already developing.


Students from the Morven Summer Institute hike on one of Morven's many undocumented--but beautiful--trails.

Morven is a 2,913-acre farm bequeathed to the University of Virginia in 2001. Besides hosting a full calendar of events throughout the year, Morven is the site of a Summer sustainability Institute, a Leadership Forum for future African leaders, a forthcoming women’s initiative and the University’s Kitchen Garden. Along with Monticello, Highland, Montpelier, the University of Virginia, the College of William and Mary, Morven is part of the Presidential Precinct. That alliance is mostly programmatic but I’ve long wondered if its alliance could be spatial too, which would open a vast (approx. 6,000 local acre) domain of connected discovery right on Charlottesville’s border.

Morven is less well known than some of its neighbors, but it is equally beautiful and historically fascinating. As part of his effort to gather his friends as neighbors, Thomas Jefferson facilitated the sale of a property known as “Indian Camp” to his friend William Short in 1796. They planned to divide the property into 100-acre tenant farms as an experiment in free yeoman agriculture that Jefferson so often extolled but did not himself practice.

Obviously, that model did not sweep the American South, but it’s a fascinating story with profound implications and many other histories are layered above and below it. Combine them with an incredible landscape and UVa’s forward-looking sustainability program and Morven becomes a multi-layered cultural landscape well worth exploring.