Tuckahoe Plantation, Virginia

Thomas Jefferson was born in 1743 in a farmhouse built by his father at Shadwell, one of a number of plantations owned by his extended family. Two years later, Thomas Jefferson’s father moved his family to Tuckahoe Plantation, on the James River near Richmond, to live with his cousin's orphaned children. This is where young Thomas Jefferson learned to read and write with the other children in the plantation’s schoolhouse. After seven years, Jefferson’s family moved back to Shadwell, which Thomas Jefferson inherited on his 21st birthday, in 1764. Tuckahoe is well preserved, and still privately owned today.