Birthplace of Meriwether Lewis

Half a mile north of this Virginia marker, Meriwether Lewis was born in seventeen seventy-four into a prominent Albemarle County family and grew up a neighbor of Thomas Jefferson. Three decades later, Jefferson chose Lewis to lead the most consequential exploration in American history. The Corps of Discovery departed in eighteen oh four and reached the mouth of the Columbia River on November fifteenth, eighteen oh five, having mapped an overland route to the Pacific that opened the American West to settlement and trade.

Lewis returned a national hero. He died under mysterious circumstances in eighteen oh nine, possibly by suicide, at a Tennessee inn along the Natchez Trace. He was thirty-five years old.

The land where he was born, just a few miles from Monticello, still carries the quiet character of the Virginia piedmont he grew up in.