Jefferson Memorial

The Jefferson Memorial is the only presidential memorial modeled on a building its subject actually designed himself — a fitting tribute to the architect-president whose own words on liberty and religious freedom are carved into its walls.

Congress authorized a memorial to Thomas Jefferson in 1934, and architect John Russell Pope — who also designed the National Gallery of Art's West Building — was selected to design it in 1937, the same year he died. Pope modeled the memorial on the ancient Roman Pantheon and, more pointedly, on the domed Rotunda Jefferson had designed himself at the University of Virginia, giving the building a direct architectural link to its subject rather than a generic classical form.

Construction beginning in 1938 required removing a number of Japanese cherry trees planted along the Tidal Basin as a 1912 gift from Tokyo, and in 1938 a group of demonstrators, including several prominent Washington women, chained themselves to the trees in protest — an episode remembered as the 'Cherry Tree Rebellion.' The memorial was dedicated on April 13, 1943, Jefferson's 200th birthday, but wartime metal restrictions meant the ceremony featured only a plaster model of the planned statue, painted to resemble bronze.

Sculptor Rudulph Evans's 19-foot bronze statue of Jefferson was finally cast and installed in 1947, completing the memorial as it stands today. Its interior walls are inscribed with Jefferson's own writing — passages from the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and his letters on government and liberty — turning the building itself into a monument to his ideas rather than only his likeness.