 
It doesn’t take long in Charlottesville to learn that Mr. Jefferson—and he is always referred to as Mr. Jefferson—hovers above the place like a deity in the sky. His stately Neo-Palladian mansion Monticello sits, always visible from town, on a ridge top overlooking, from about four miles away, the equally graceful university he founded and designed. Equal parts ponytailed mascot and democratizing exemplar, Mr. Jefferson is regularly invoked when local dilemmas arise. He remains such a model of insightful reason, in fact, that the question “What would Mr. Jefferson think?” often seems less a point of consideration than a tedious chorus. But then, when you inherit five thousand acres from your father—a surveyor who also claimed the tens of thousands of acres that became Charlottesville’s surrounding Albemarle County—and spend your life and exhaust your wealth tweaking the place to Platonic, art-directed perfection, maybe you deserve enduring love and credit. After all, it is a pretty cool spot. Still, to view today’s Charlottesville merely as an extended Monticello theme park overlooks the city’s soul—which actually springs very much from the ground up. I have a favorite trout stream that at a few points overlooks Charlottesville and the surrounding county at panoramic remove. And every time I fish it, standing up there on the side of a Blue Ridge in the hours after sunrise, staring across the voluptuous roll of the Virginia Piedmont to the east—green and almost edibly tender looking—well, the scene is nothing short of inspiring. It is pure, uncut national anthem–grade stuff. A mix of forest and fields, with endless folded valleys and farmhouses dotting the hilltops, the judicious blend of landscape to man seems, well, downright Jeffersonian. People here live with nature: There are community vegetable gardens and community-supported farms, a recycling center, and a walking/running trail along the Rivanna River that almost encircles the town. On any given morning you may find thirty wild turkeys in your backyard, or a red fox may dart across the road in front of you. Lately, there’ve been numerous mountain lion sightings; one farmer even got a grainy photo of one using his cell phone camera. And every autumn there’s the obligatory black bear news, sometimes even downtown. In advance of winter, the bears wander in lured by wind-fallen fruit or garbage cans, and animal control is dispatched to capture them and release them in the national forest. The event inevitably makes TV news, and everybody chuckles over it for a day or two. Fortunately, few bears meet misfortune. This same gentle tension exists amid the area’s humans. There’s conservative red-state Albemarle County (God, farms, guns!) surrounding Charlottesville’s blue-state university town (Give everyone a living wage!), creating a dialectic that somehow—thanks to Mr. Jefferson’s polite example—doesn’t calcify into too many hard feelings. Overlaying this are more recent, and sometimes volatile, differences between what are known locally as the “from heres” and the “come heres.” Over the past decade or so, Charlottesville and the surrounding county have been anointed as “the best place to live in America” and have experienced the predictable, near-simultaneous population boom that springs from such designations. Farmers and environmentalists still bemoan land turned into housing; the roads have filled up (a point of universal aggravation), and with each summer’s dry spell, the exhausted water table has grown so sketchy that, at various times over the past several years, even the fanciest local restaurants have switched to paper plates to comply with water reduction requirements. Since then, growth has been more closely managed; still, when another drought threatened last summer, water restrictions were knocked back into place. Laissez-Faire Admittedly, the population boom has brought some problems. And yet, no matter how anyone feels about the growth (and until recently local real estate professionals felt very good about it), there’s one immutable fact everyone agrees on: You can’t blame anybody for wanting to live here. What makes some towns more appealing than others—people or place? While this may be hard to answer, one obvious reason Charlottesville continues to be magnetic is that many of those who live here do it by choice—and that makes for a darned happy populace. While the University of Virginia is an enormous source of local employment, many newer arrivals take their paychecks from somewhere else. Most recently, we’ve seen a tide of incoming hedge-fund managers join the area’s scrum of big-time scribes—John Grisham, Tami Hoag, Rita Mae Brown, Jan Karon—plus film and TV directors, and a slew of famous actors. On the music front, you’ve got your Dave Matthews and his band, and Mary Chapin Carpenter. Not to mention NFL Hall of Famer turned TV broadcaster Howie Long. All of them love it here for the same reason: It’s beautiful; the schools are good; and it’s a nice place to raise kids or live a simple, quiet life. It’s that Jeffersonian dynamic balance. Well, that, and the fact that people have their own stuff happening and they’re too busy enjoying it to get bent out of shape about much. Which makes it pretty easy for even newcomers to settle in. This is true whether you’re a celebrity…or a mountain lion. Mingling For me, if there’s a moment that encapsulates all that is good about Charlottesville it’s an event that happens twice annually, courtesy of my friends John and Beth Neville Evans. Sometime during the winter holidays and during the height of summer’s richness, they host parties at their white four-over-four classic Virginia farmhouse. Plugged into the surrounding fields, the house feels like it’s been there forever. Standing guard in the front field is a life-size sculpture of a rhinoceros. The rhino’s point is lost on no one: “Yeah, this place looks normal, but it’s far more interesting than that.” Winter and summer, it seems everybody in town is there to enjoy John and Beth Neville’s hospitality. We park in lines of cars in the field fronting the house, and John, a nationally recognized painter, and Beth Neville, a seamstress turned educational activist, welcome you with a smile. There’s university professor and NAACP chair Julian Bond, with his wife, Pam; a scattering of local musicians, some just back from international tours; and busy viticulturist Chris Hill, who always seems to show up with a case of the newest “must try” wine. In the kitchen (or out near the vegetable garden, depending on the season) is the restoration carpenter and sometime sheep farmer Langley Freeauf, a local legend, with a couple of his buddies; and there are others, too: morning radio personality Anne Williams; UVA professor Garrick Louis (a world authority on drinking water) and his wife, Debbie; farmer/physician Ed Chitwood and his lovely bride, author/illustrator Suzanne Tanner Chitwood. And yet, in this mix of religious and agnostic, black and white, conservative and liberal, the vibe is far more one of unity than polarity. They all listen as much as they talk, and the conversation turns in dozens of interesting directions, from serious to funny and quiet to raucous, all in an hour or two. In winter, we all sit at a long planked refectory table, dining on baked ham and potatoes. In summer, everyone’s outside with barbecue and coleslaw and potluck dishes at long tables and Adirondack chairs. The summer party is always the wilder affair, with children doing a fine job of stripping John and Beth Neville’s wild blackberry bushes of fruit before getting muddy in the little creek behind the house. Then, as darkness arrives, sometimes a band strikes up, and under the stars, people dance. It almost goes without saying that John and Beth Neville’s place is just a few minutes’ drive from Mr. Jefferson and Monticello. Around Charlottesville, he’s never all that far away. |
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