Poplar Forest was Thomas Jefferson's Bedford County plantation and plantation house in what is now Forest, Virginia, near Lynchburg. He designed it and treated it as a private retreat, working on it from 1806 until his death 20 years later. "It is the most valuable of my possessions," Jefferson once wrote a correspondent. Although he had intended it for his youngest daughter Mary Jefferson Eppes and her family, she died at age 26. He entrusted it to her only surviving son Francis W. Eppes.