"President Bush will attend the July 4 event at Monticello, the White House has announced today.

Bush will be the featured speaker at Monticello’s 46th annual Independence Day Celebration and Naturalization Ceremony. He will become the fourth sitting president to participate in Independence Day activities at Monticello, joining Franklin D. Roosevelt (1936), Harry S. Truman (1947), and Gerald R. Ford (1976), according to a news release from Monticello.

“We are truly honored to have President Bush as our featured speaker on July 4, and regard it as a great compliment that he has chosen to spend part of the last Independence Day of his presidency at Monticello,” said Daniel P. Jordan, president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the private, nonprofit organization that has owned and operated Monticello since 1923.

In the naturalization ceremony, 75 people from 30 different countries are to be sworn in as U.S. citizens. Since 1963, more than 3,000 men and women have taken the oath of citizenship at Monticello in Independence Day ceremonies that are formal sessions of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia. All the prospective citizens are residents of the federal court district and all were selected for the Monticello ceremony by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The Independence Day event is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. and members of the public will be admitted free of charge. Detailed information about the event and about Monticello’s other operations on July 4 will be announced early next week." (The Daily Progress, June 27, 2008)