Saving Monticello: The Newsletter
The latest about the book, author events, and more
Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson
Volume XIX, Number 10 October 2022
“The study of the past is a constantly evolving,
never-ending journey of discovery.” – Eric Foner
AN IDEAL PLACE TO PLAY: It’s not every day that you get to read a first-person account of a visit to Monticello in 1940, much less one written by a Levy Family descendant. But I was fortunate enough last month to receive a copy of “Spring at Monticello,” a scrapbook entry written by Nancy Hoffman, a granddaughter of L. Napoleon Levy—and a grandniece of his brother, Jefferson M. Levy who owned Monticello from 1879 to 1923.
In her short account, Nancy Hoffman describes a visit to the mountaintop she made that year when she was ten years old with her sister Pam, their mother Alma Hendricks Levy Bookman, and three family friends—a mother and her two daughters. Many thanks to Nancy’s son Rob Hoffman for kindly scanning and emailing it to me.
The mothers and daughters piled into the Bookman family station wagon in New York and drove south to their first stop in Virginia, Colonial Williamsburg. Touring the restored 18th century buildings, Nancy Hoffman wrote, was “a ten-year-old’s dream come true.”
A highlight for the New Yorkers was a meal featuring Southern fried chicken and Virginia ham biscuits; another was running into Katherine Hepburn in one of the historic houses. “For us kids, it was a first,” she wrote, “and a huge treat to have been so close to living, breathing, big movie star.”
The next stop was Monticello. When Nancy’s mother drove up to the old gatehouse that was used to greet visitors in those days, an older African American man “came out to see who we were,” Nancy remembered. “When he saw my mother behind the wheel, his face lit up and he cried out incredulously, his voice rising as he spoke, ‘Alma??? Alma???’”
The man “recognized my mother from long ago [visits],” Nancy wrote, as he had worked at Monticello for Jefferson Levy. “But the astonishing part was that he had not seen my mother since she was a young girl. Here she was all grown up, behind the wheel of an automobile, yet he knew her immediately, and with obvious affection, called out her name.”
Her mother, Nancy said, “called his name with some surprise, nodded her head and affirmed that she was indeed Alma. Mother offered him a ride up to the house.” The “fragile, white-haired” man seemed reticent at first, then said he would have to get permission to join them. So, Nancy said, “He got on the phone and received the okay to accompany us.”
The man—whose name Nancy could not recall when she wrote the remembrance—likely was William Page, the husband of Lucy Coleman Barnaby Page, who had been the gatekeeper at Monticello since 1932. William Page was one of the first tour guides at Monticello in 1923 when the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation purchased the place from Jefferson Levy.
The family drove up from the gatehouse to Monticello and had a private tour of the house. As the man and her mother reminisced,” Nancy wrote, “he took us up to the third floor, the closed-off rotunda where my mother, her siblings and cousins used to stay when they spent the summer there with their Uncle Jeff.”
Monticello, she remembered, “appeared like a vast open indoor space, flooded with light and an ideal place to play. I could picture us dressing up and putting on plays. My mother seemed like the luckiest little girl in the world to have spent summers there with her family.”
It “was a glorious visit and one of the best vacations I ever spent, wallowing in America’s past, enjoying Virginia’s culinary expertise and being treated so royally at my young age in such a magnificent mansion that my mother, for several summers, had called home.”
THE DOC: Steven Pressman’s great doc, The Levys of Monticello, is being screened at several film
festivals this fall. On October 10, it’ll be shown at the Jacob Burns Film
Center as part of the Westchester Jewish Film
Festival. There’s an in-person screening on Sunday, November 6, at the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville, after which I’ll be taking part in a
Q&A with Steve, Susan Stein, and Niya Bates. The next screening is set for November 13 at the Philadelphia
Jewish Film Festival in partnership with Philadelphia’s National Museum of
American Jewish History.
For more info, go to https://bit.ly/LevyDoc
EVENTS: I’ll
be doing three book talks in October. On Sunday,
October 2, I have a Zoom talk on Saving
Monticello for the Shearith Israel
Sisterhood book club in Dallas.
I’ll
be speaking about my book What So Proudly
We Hailed: Francis Scott Key, A Life, on Thursday, October 6, at the luncheon meeting of the Alexandria
(Va.) Committee of Colonial Dames.
And
I’ll be doing a talk on Flag: An American
Biography on Tuesday, October 11,
for the Kate Waller Barret DAR Chapter in Mount Vernon, Virginia.
If you’d
like to arrange an event for Saving
Monticello or for any of my other books, email me at marcleepson@gmail.com
For details on other upcoming events, check the Events page on my website: https://bit.ly/NewAppearances
GIFT IDEAS: For a personally autographed, brand-new paperback copy of Saving Monticello, please e-mail marcleepson@gmail.com I also have a few as-new, unopened hardcover
copies, along with a good selection of new copies of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate
Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; Flag:
An American Biography; and Ballad of
the Green Beret: The Life and Wars of Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler.
The SM
Newsletter on Line: You can read back issues of this
newsletter at http://bit.ly/SMOnline
