Walkin' Monticello

A Florida Heritage downtown and "courthouse town," Monticello has more than 40 historic buildings, including City Hall in this photo. Most folks think of Florida as a young state--and it is. But the land that Native Americans knew for centuries was first settled by Europeans long before Plymouth Rock in St. Augustine. If you love history, Monticello (est. 1827) will tell it. It's like a town-sized Thomas Jefferson museum. North Florida was settled first by the British and then by American colonists from South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. Monticello in Jefferson County and similar towns in the Cotton Belt were slave-owning, plantation economies just like the rest of Dixie. They represented the Southeast corner of "The Peculiar Institution." The cotton may be gone, but the name, look, and feel of the town are memorials to that way of life.

The Episcopal Church is a stroll north from the County Courthouse.

The Jefferson County Courthouse, built in 1908 to look exactly like Jefferson's Monticello.

The Courthouse from the Chamber of Commerce.

Monticello Chamber of Commerce