Saving Monticello Newsletter: February 2025

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

Volume XXII, Number 2 February 2025

THE BACHELORS: Coincidence or not, both Uriah Levy and his nephew Jefferson Monroe Levy were long-time bachelors. Uriah married late in life (more on that below), and, like his life-long, never-married nephew, he did not have any children.

Valentine’s Day month 2025 seems like an appropriate time to look at the love lives of the two men who owned (and repaired, preserved, and restored) Monticello from 1836 when Uriah Levy took ownership of the estate, to 1923 when Jefferson Levy sold it to the just-formed Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation.

Uriah Levy led a bachelor’s life until his 61st year in 1853 when he courted and married Virginia Lopez, who was born on September 25, 1835, less than a year before Uriah Levy took possession of Monticello. She was 18 years old.

That may seem a tad scandalous, but consider, too, that Virginia Lopez was Uriah Levy’s niece, the youngest of the three children of Uriah’s sister Frances (known as Fanny) and Abraham Lopez, who lived in Kingston, Jamaica.

The only known photograph of Uriah Levy, taken just prior to his death in 1862

In taking Virginia’s hand in marriage, as I noted in Saving Monticello, Uriah was following an ancient, if obscure, Jewish tradition that obligated the closest unmarried male relative of a recently orphaned or widowed woman in financial difficulties to marry her. Said financial troubles all but certainly stemmed from the fact that Abraham Lopez—sometimes referred to as Judge Lopez—had fallen on hard financial times by the time he died in 1849 when Virgina was 14 years old. Before that, however, he had prospered and provided well for his family. The well-off Lopezes had the wherewithal, for one thing, to send Virginia to boarding school in England.

In the absence of the discovery of a marriage license or any other primary sources to prove it, it appears that the May-December couple wed in the fall of 1853. And that the nuptials took place in New York City where Uriah lived and where Virginia and her mother Fanny moved from Jamaica sometime after Judge Lopez’s death four years earlier. We also know that sometime after the wedding, Uriah moved Virginia and Fanny into his large townhouse at 107 St. Mark's Place in the East Village in Manhattan.

Fanny Levy died in 1857 and sometime after that Uriah’s unmarried sister, Amelia, moved into the house on St. Mark’s with her brother and young sister-in-law, Virginia. We know that because in 1860 the U.S. Census (above) listed Commodore and Virginia Levy, age 60 and 25, living in Manhattan, along with Amelia Levy, 50, and an Irish servant named Nora McGrath, 22. Uriah and Amelia’s places of birth were listed as Philadelphia and Virginia’s as “West Indies.”

Uriah Levy died at age 70 in that house on March 22, 1862. Virginia Lopez Levy later remarried and died on May 5, 1925 in New York at age 90—63 years after Uriah Levy’s death.

****************

As for the lifelong bachelor Jefferson Levy, who was born in New York in 1852—the year before UPL and Virginia Lopez married—his name regularly popped up in the society pages of the (many) New York City newspapers and those in Washington, D.C., and Virginia, as he led an extravagant Gilded Age lifestyle after making a fortune in real estate and stock speculation in the 1870s and ‘80s.

Jefferson Levy traveled widely and often, typically in the company of other upper-crust late nineteenth and early twentieth century globetrotters.

Jefferson M. Levy

On one of his many social sojourns, Jefferson Levy crossed the Atlantic to spend some leisure time in England in the summer of 1902. The man the Washington Post described as “one of the most conspicuous bachelor hosts of the London season,” among other things, gave a dinner at a fancy London hotel in August in the early days of the reign of King Edward VII and its Edwardian Era upper class excesses.

Jefferson Levy, who, like his uncle, lived in New York City, repaired to Monticello early in September that year, where he threw a big party for the artist George Burroughs Torrey (1863-1942), who had painted a portrait of Levy that he had placed in Monticello.

The conspicuous bachelor sometimes was linked to eligible woman of his social strata, but no evidence has surfaced that he came close to marrying. Levy, it appears, was very comfortable in his bachelorhood. For example, in the summer of 1912, when rumors circulated in Washington that he was engaged to be married to Flora Wilson, the socially prominent daughter of Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson*, Levy—a Democratic congressman from New York at the time—picked up his phone and called The New York Times to set the record straight.

In a short article in the September 3, 1912 Times, oddly headlined “L.M. Levy Is Not to Wed,” the paper noted that Levy called the Times’ Washington office from Monticello to let the paper know there was no truth to the rumor.

That was the summer in which Levy faced a nationwide effort by Maude Littleton to induce Congress to take Monticello from him and turn it into a government-run presidential house museum—an effort he vigorously opposed in congressional hearings and in the court of public opinion.

The rumors that he was engaged to Flora Lewis—a suffragist and trained coloratura operatic soprano—had “no other basis than the possible desire of somebody to make capital out of the fact that Miss Wilson recently came to his rescue by publicly declaring against the federal acquisition of Monticello over his protest,” The Times reported.

“Mr. Levy said he regretted the report of an engagement and there was no foundation for it.”

Flora Wilson, 1912

*A former Congressman from Iowa, James Wilson had served as the Secretary of Agriculture since 1897. He stepped down early in 1913, and has the distinction of being the longest-serving Cabinet secretary in U.S. history.

EVENTS AND COMMERCE: I have a growing number of events scheduled starting in March, most of them for my new book, The Unlikely War Hero, a slice-of-life biography of the extraordinary Vietnam War story of Doug Hegdahl, the youngest and lowest ranking American prisoner held in Hanoi during the war. For details on upcoming events, check the Events page on my website: marcleepson.com/events

If you’d like to arrange a talk on The Unlikely War Hero, Saving Monticello, or any of my other books, please email me at marcleepson@gmail.com

The Unlikely War Hero’s first printing sold out before the official December 17 publication date and it became the Number 1 bestselling Vietnam War History book on Amazon. The second printing sold out not long after it came out in mid-January, and the book is now in its third printing.

I have a few copies of the first printing. To order one, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering I also have brand-new paperback copies of Saving Monticello and a few as-new hardcovers, as well as paperback copies of Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; and Ballad of the Green Beret.