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Connections

Remember James Burke's Connections? I miss this show, and was saddened to read that there hasn't been an episode since 1997, and there's seemingly none planned for the future.

I am currently going through a Thomas Jefferson phase (as I imagine most libertarians do), and recently experienced my own, personal connections. But first, a little background: The Rammage Family has recently left The People's Republic of Maryland and is in the process of building a new home in Fauquier County, VA. My excitement on moving to the Old Dominion should be apparent, and I've already traced my new property through its previous owners back to King George III King Charles II (with, admittedly, a few gaps here and there.) While I quickly familiarized myself with such local legends as John Marshall and John "Gray Ghost" Mosby, I hadn't researched yet the origins of Fauquier.

Rewind the clock by four years and the Rammage Family was visiting London on winter holiday. In a whirlwind tour of the city that lasted five days, we caught the two most popular churches, Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's Cathedral, along with a Christmas Eve service in a less touristy church, St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

Fast-forward to present-day and my ongoing Jefferson phase, and I'm currently reading Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder by Jack Mclaughlin. The author takes somewhat of a different approach to biographies, and analyzes Jefferson through his owner/builder architectural design and construction of Monticello. A young Thomas Jefferson befriended the royal governor of the Virginia Colony, Francis Fauquier, who was, as McLaughlin wrote, "important in establishing Jefferson's artistic and architectural tastes."

And here's where my personal connections came to light while reading the following excerpt:

But Fauquier may also have encouraged Jefferson's interest in a more direct way. In London, before coming to the colonies, Fauquier rented a house in a fashionable section of the town, now Argyll Street near Oxford Circus, from none other than James Gibbs, one of England's most illustrious architects.

Like Fauquier, Gibbs was a member of the Royal Society, and in the close-knit circles of the privileged classes of London, the two men were quite likely social acquaintances. Gibbs had designed some of the most impressive buildings in England in the [Christopher] Wren style. His masterpiece, St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church, remains one of London's architectural landmarks, its monumental Corinthian portico and soaring baroque steeple overlooking Trafalgar Square.

His reputation was increased throughout England and the colonies by two publications, A Book of Architecture, a pattern book of his most popular buildings, and Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture, a textbook to be used for designing orders correctly. A Book of Architecture was the most popular style of book of the eighteenth century, and Jefferson had a copy of it, quite possibly purchased at the urging of Fauquier. He also owned Gibbs's Rules and used it to set the proportions for the earliest drawings of the porticoes at Monticello.

So there you have it: from Gibbs to Fauquier to Jefferson to my Jefferson Phase and the subsequent building of our own "monticello" in Fauquier County. Now if only I can convince Mrs. Rammage the desperate need to include a Palladian double portico on our new 4-bedroom colonial, the circle of my own personal connections will be complete.