James Monroe spent much of his youth on these lands as one of five children in the household of his father, Spence Monroe, a middling farmer of modest but respectable means and a trained joiner or cabinet maker. The family house stood near the center of Spence Monroe's holdings, facing south toward Monroe Creek and extending more than 5,000 feet beyond present-day S.R. 205, and an appraisal made after Spence Monroe's death in 1774 showed a working farm with a modest group of outbuildings. Records show that, besides the Monroe family, the farm was home to enslaved persons named Peter, Joe, Cuffee, Kate, Fanny, Nell and child, Mud, Ralph, and Daphne, and another named individual, Samuel Cooper, is believed to have been an indentured servant. Although few surviving images or maps reveal the historic appearance of Westmoreland County or the Monroe birthplace, Monroe's 1780 advertisement offering the nearly 550-acre estate for sale described level, rich land with valuable oak timber, an excellent apple and peach orchard, marshes along the creek that could be made into meadow, and a dwelling house with a passage and several rooms below, along with a kitchen, barn, stables, and other necessary out-houses. An 1839 woodcut provides the earliest known likeness of the residence, showing an eighteenth-century farm complex with dooryard gardens, fencing, cultivated fields, an apiary, and at its center a one-and-one-half-story wooden three-bay house with two chimneys. Local tradition long placed Monroe's birth home near a large locust tree, and a 1976 archaeological investigation confirmed that location while also finding that a commemorative road built around the 1950s had unintentionally cut through the east end of the house remains. Further archaeological work since the 1970s indicates that the eighteenth-century house measured fifty-eight by eighteen feet and included a central hallway with rooms on either side, end chimneys, a cellar with a bulkhead entrance, and a two-room addition; artifacts suggest it was built around 1752, occupied from about 1752 to 1850, and likely no longer standing by the early to mid nineteenth century.