Benjamin Henry Latrobe, born in 1764 and later best known for his work on the United States Capitol, moved from England to Virginia in 1796. In July 1796, before continuing to Mount Vernon, he visited Rippon Lodge, the home of Colonel Thomas Blackburn, and during his stay he sketched several buildings there. Latrobe was a friendly acquaintance of Blackburn and corresponded with him regularly about people they both knew. While at Rippon Lodge, Latrobe also described and drew wasps living within the lodge's walls. Although his notes on the wasps were detailed, he wrote little about the people living there. In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson summoned him to Washington to complete the Capitol, a project that occupied him for the rest of his life. In his July 1796 comments on Rippon Lodge, Latrobe wrote that the house on the left must have been built nearly 100 years earlier, since the oldest people then living did not remember hearing when or by whom it was built, that the family used both houses because neither was sufficiently commodious on its own, and that Colonel Blackburn seemed to have intended to unite them with a large room between the two.