Charlottsville - Virginia - History

Charlottesville's history begins in the eighteenth century--long before the granting of the city charter in 1888. Charlottesville's story begins with the story of the surrounding County of Albemarle.

Occasional trappers and squatters explored this area before it was settled.  However, the earliest land grant in this area was actually settled and planted in 1727.

Albemarle County was carved out of Goochland County in 1744, and named for William Anne Keppel, Earle of Albemarle, who was the Virginia Colony's official Royal Governor General in England. Then on December 23, 1762, the General Assembly passed an act, which established a county seat,  a town located on the "Three Notched Road, which was at that time the main route between the Shenandoah Valley and Richmond.  This new town, more centrally located in the County, was named Charlottesville after Queen Charlotte-Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the young bride of King George III of England. 

A famous celebrity,  Thomas Jefferson, was the 3rd. American President.A man not yet forty, tall and with a mild and pleasing countenance . . . An American, who without ever having quitted his own country, is at once a musician, skilled in drawing; a geometrician, an astronomer, a natural philosopher, legislator, and statesmen . . . Sometimes natural philosophy, at others politicks or the arts were the topics of our conversation, for no object had escaped Mr. Jefferson; and it seemed as if from his youth he had placed his mind, as he has done his house, on an elevated situation, from which he might contemplate the universe.

After American independence was won,  Thomas Jefferson worked for the revision of the laws of his home state of Virginia, to bring them into conformity with the freedoms embraced by the new Constitution of the United States.

In the Election of 1880,  Jefferson defeated his old friend John Adams to become the third president of the new United States. An inveterate collector of books, Jefferson sold his personal library to Congress in 1815 in order to rebuild the collection of the Congressional Library, which was destroyed by a fire in 1814. The last years of his life were spent in retirement at Monticello, during which period he founded, designed, and directed the building of the University of Virginia.