5. James Monroe
Born on April 28, 1758, James Monroe was another presidential product of Tidewater Virginia whose family plantation in Westmoreland County was five miles from Washington’s birthplace at Popes Creek Plantation. The Monroe plantation and house were of modest size by colonial Virginia standards and, perhaps more so than some of the wealthier Virginia gentility, Monroe was raised to the physical labor as well as the management of the farm. Monroe’s parents died when Monroe was a teenager, and at sixteen Monroe was the head of household responsible for his four siblings. At the age of seventeen, the militant Madison enlisted with the Third Virginia Regiment of the Continental Army to fight the British. In 2001, the James Monroe Memorial Foundation initiated efforts to build a replica of the lost birth home.
-Andrew B. Leiter
Another difficult site to photograph. There is really not much here other than the remnants of an excavation of the foundation and the surrounding woods. A small museum also sits on the site with models of the eventual reconstructed home. I arrived mid afternoon, hungry and tired--not a good mix for making pictures. In the end, I spent most of my time in the surrounding woods, imagining what is must have been like for a young James--the 1760s in America in the countryside. What a wide open, wild, and undefined place it must have been. I did my best to make a few pictures that tried to capture this primal feeling, capitalizing on the light filtering down through the treetops.