Thomas Jefferson founds the University of Virginia…
January 1819 CE
In 1802, while serving as President of the United States, Jefferson had written to artist Charles Willson Peale that his concept of the new university would be "on the most extensive and liberal scale that our circumstances would call for and our faculties meet," and that it might even attract talented students from "other states to come, and drink of the cup of knowledge".
Virginia was already home to the College of William and Mary, but Jefferson had lost all confidence in his alma mater, partly because of its religious nature—it requires all its students to recite a catechism—and its stifling of the sciences.
Jefferson had flourished under William and Mary professors William Small and George Wythe decades earlier, but the college was in a period of great decline and his concern became so dire by 1800 that he expressed to British chemist Joseph Priestley, "we have in that State, a college just well enough endowed to draw out the miserable existence to which a miserable constitution has doomed it."
In 1817, three Presidents (Jefferson, James Monroe, and James Madison) and Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court John Marshall had joined twenty-four other dignitaries at a meeting held in the Mountain Top Tavern at Rockfish Gap.
After some deliberation, they had selected nearby Charlottesville as the site of the new University of Virginia.
Farmland just outside Charlottesville was purchased from James Monroe by the Board of Visitors as Central College.
The school had laid its first building's cornerstone late in that same year, and the Commonwealth of Virginia charters the new university on January 25, 1819.
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