![]() Stone was quarried for use in the University’s original buildings. Records suggest that enslaved laborers and independent contractors cut wood for use in 19th century kitchens, fireplaces and kilns, Takahashi and Anderson wrote. The need for the mountain’s wood and stone also waned over time. (The city of Charlottesville built a water treatment plant at the base of the mountain in 1923.) The Observatory Hill reservoir became a leisure destination and swimming hole. ![]() Shown in 1893, the Old Reservoir was a popular leisure destination.īy 1888, after a larger off-site reservoir was built, UVA no longer relied on the piped spring water. “Without the spring, it’s just a hill,” Takahashi says. It wasn’t until 1825, the year the first classes met, that the Board of Visitors acquired an additional 132 acres containing the spring and the waters running off it, connecting the noncontiguous parcels, securing the water and knitting everything together. Nor was that land contiguous to the other tract he bought, a cleared, farmed parcel that became the site of the Academical Village below. The spring was not part of the original mountain parcel of 153 acres he purchased in 1817. Securing the water was a close call, for as visionary as it was, Jefferson’s plan “was not perfect,” Takahashi says. Jefferson coveted it for its water, wood and stone, but especially for the water. More than just nice to look at, the land-simply labeled “mountains” in Jefferson’s 1817 survey of “Lands of the Central College”-was central to his conception of UVA, not acquired later, as many assume, Takahashi says. Jefferson’s 1817 survey of “Lands of the Central College” labeled a 153-acre tract “Mountains.”Īlbert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, UVA In artists’ renderings of the nascent University, it sits companionably in the background, “as a topographic counterpart to the domed Rotunda, its rural wooded aspect in contrast to the village below,” Takahashi and Garth Anderson (Arch ’16), UVA’s facilities management historian, wrote in a 2018 paper, Downhill/Uphill: Material Flows Between a Mountain and an Academical Village. The mountain has been imprinted in the popular image of UVA for nearly two centuries. The 137-year-old Leander McCormick Observatory presides at its peak. Deer, snakes, turtles and other woodland creatures also roam.Ĭold War-era science buildings, including a former nuclear reactor, populate its lower slopes. The occasional bear is seen on the hill’s upper reaches. Birders flock from mid-April through May, during migration season. Geological Survey calls Mount Jefferson it’s also known as Observatory Mountain or at UVA as O-Hill.īy whatever name, it’s well used. O-Hill’s trail system offers 300 feet of vertical drop for more daring riders such as local BMX rider Ronnie Vance. ![]() “This is the spot that Jefferson knew,” she says. The story she discovered is one reason she enjoys bringing people to the spring, an unmarked spot that looks much the same as it would have 200 years ago. She became interested in its history when she served as principal at Hereford College, located along the mountain. ![]() The role the mountain played in establishing UVA and sustaining it in its early days is not widely known, says Nancy Takahashi (Arch ’76, ’85), associate professor emerita of landscape architecture in UVA’s School of Architecture. It’s not every university that has its own mountain, and not every mountain that nurtured a university. The mountain not only supplied water, but wood and stone, life-sustaining materials for UVA in its earliest days. Not just any mountain spring but the water source that made the college below it possible. It came from the head of a mountain spring. Amid the hubbub, however, was a quieter scene.Ībout 100 yards off the pavement, up a narrow path, a trickle of water meandered downhill. Rising 865 feet on the western edge of Grounds, crisscrossed by a network of trails and covered by a canopy of chestnut oak and hickory trees, the hill is a haven for recreation. ![]() On Observatory Hill one fall evening, mountain bikers barreled down rocky slopes, joggers chugged up steep inclines, and four-legged explorers sniffed around, leading their owners at the end of leashes. ![]()
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