Farmington

The clubhouse of the Farmington Country Club, located in Albemarle County, Virginia, is a historic building with a center section dating to the eighteenth century, and an octagonal east wing designed by Thomas Jefferson.

The land on which the house sits was originally acquired by Michael Holland in 1744 through a land grant from King George II. In 1758, the property was acquired by Francis Jerdone, who built the original residence sometime prior to 1780. The center section of the clubhouse, once the original farmhouse, is a two-story, three-bay brick structure with a side-hall plan.^[1]

In 1785, the property was purchased by George Divers, a friend of Thomas Jefferson. Divers asked Jefferson to design an addition to the original house, and in 1802 Jefferson’s plan for an elongated, octagonal wing for the east side of the building was built.^[2] The Jefferson addition featured a Tuscan portico and "bull's-eye" windows.^[3] The original floor-plan for the interior divided the space into two rooms of unequal size; however, in the mid-nineteenth century an additional floor-level was added.^[4]

In 1927 the property was purchased by Farmington, Inc., and converted into a clubhouse for the newly founded Farmington Country Club. The interior of the east wing was subsequently converted into a single large space, and the original two-room floor-plan designed by Jefferson, as well as the second floor level added later, was removed. Since its conversion into the clubhouse, the building has received numerous additions.^[5]