Oak Hill (James Monroe House)
Oak Hill is a mansion and plantation near Leesburg, Virginia that was for 22 years a home of James Monroe, the fifth U.S. President. The main mansion of the property was constructed in 1822 for Monroe, who subsequently split time between this estate and another home at Monroe Hill on the grounds of the University of Virginia after his term as President.
The estate is a designated U.S. National Historic Landmark.
Oak Hill was Monroe's only residence for three years, from 1827 to 1830, and it was one of his residences during 22 years. The mansion was built in 1820, during Monroe's presidency. Before that, Monroe's residence at the estate was the clapboard building known in recent years as the Monroe Cottage.
The architecture is distinctive for "its unusual pentastyle portico". It is suggested that Thomas Jefferson, his close friend, may well have drawn plans for Oak Hill; the construction was supervised by James Hoban, designer and builder of the White House.
Structures remaining from Monroe's time include the main house, the cottage, a smokehouse, springhouse, blacksmith's shop, a square barn, the stone Stallion Barn, and possibly the Brick House.
Read more about Oak Hill (James Monroe House): Purchase, Attempted Sale, Retirement
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The Helicon of too many poets is not a hill crowned with sunshine and visited by the Muses and the Graces, but an old, mouldering house, full of gloom and haunted by ghosts.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)
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—Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962)