James Monroe Museum and Memorial Library

The brick building on Charles Street traces to 1758. What's here now is that original structure joined to a square 1964 addition—two halves of an L. The older brick held, tradition says, James Monroe's law office from 1786 to 1789, the years after he'd resigned from the Congress of the Confederation and before he stood as a delegate to Virginia's ratifying convention for the Constitution, where he opposed adoption until a Bill of Rights could be added.

Laurence Hoes, a Monroe family descendant, acquired the property in 1928 and founded the James Monroe Memorial Foundation to manage it. He gathered Monroe artifacts, restored the building, and opened it as a museum. The 1964 addition came when the foundation gave the property to the Commonwealth; the University of Mary Washington operates it now. Inside: original Monroe objects and memorabilia, dresses worn by First Lady Elizabeth Monroe, a small library stocked with volumes similar to those Monroe might have owned. Most of the furnishings date to the nineteenth century. Out back: a memorial garden with a bronze bust of Monroe by Margaret French Cresson, daughter of Daniel Chester French.

The building was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1966. You go because the accumulation—what the descendants decided to keep, what they restored, what they opened to strangers—is here, specific and intact, on a site Monroe is said to have worked.