James Monroe owned thousands of acres in the foothills of the Piedmont – his plantation next to that of Thomas Jefferson, but 20th century historians found only a modest house on the grounds, and the property Monroe called Highland did not draw the crowds that turned Monticello into a multi-million-dollar tourist attraction.
Then, in 2016, Highland announced that there was a larger house on the site – one which had burned down, and what we thought was Monroe’s place was, in fact, a guest house.
“The insurance document that insured the main house said the cellar was stone. This is brick," says archaeologist Sara Bon-Harper.
She adds that the brick work for the guest house was not right for the age when Monroe’s home was built.
“These are called headers," she says, pointing to one kind of brick. "These are called Stretchers. There are five rows of stretchers between rows of headers, and that gives a date that didn’t really jive with 1799, which was the construction date of the main house."
Now the Executive Director of Highland, she hopes this discovery might elevate Monroe’s reputation as the accomplished statesman he was.
“Monroe’s career from the time he was a teen fighting in the revolution to a popular two-term president was about establishing, preserving and expanding the young United States.”
As U.S. Ambassador to France, for example, he was involved with the $15 million purchase of Louisiana, and as president he warned Europe to keep its hands off the western hemisphere as our neighbors in the Caribbean, South and Central America fought for their freedom.
He also oversaw a compromise that helped head off civil war by admitting Missouri as a slave state while carving Maine away from Massachusetts to create a new free state in the union.
Today, his home tells those stories and introduces a new exhibit which recounts the area's history in sound
The Monacan Indians lived on this land – hunting and gathering. Settlers from England created vast plantations of grain, tobacco and cotton, and there are painful sounds of slavery as captives from Africa worked the land and families were torn apart by the sale of human beings into the deep south.

Bon-Harper says one goal of James Monroe’s Highland is to inspire our own interest in U.S. history and to show how this property and its people went from the Civil War and Reconstruction to Jim Crow and the great migration.
“An art museum should make you want to go home and paint or sketch or sculpt, right?” she says. “Maybe going to the opera will make you want to sing in the shower. A history museum should inspire your curiosity about the past and make you want to learn more and discover more for yourself.”
One exhibit offers guidance, showing how government records, newspaper archives, family letters and online resources can help us to learn not only about Monroe and the residents who followed but about our own place in history – how our times shape us, and how we can influence the time in which we live.