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- Marc Leepson
Volume XXII, Number 11 November 2025
Two months of sometimes testy contract negotiations followed. Then, on May 31, the two parties finalized Monticello’s sale. The Foundation signed an option for the property that day and gave Levy $10,000 in cash in earnest money to be applied to the purchase price.
The agreement stipulated that the Foundation would pay Levy $100,000 in cash upon closing; $100,000 after the Foundation received free and clear title to the property; and the balance ($290,000) would be paid off over several years through the sale of TJMF bonds.
Levy received the first payment of $100,000 when he
signed the title of Monticello—which had been in his family since his uncle,
Uriah Levy, bought it in 1834—over to the Foundation in New York City on
December 1, 1923. “The cash and the bonds and mortgage were delivered to Levy,
and Levy signed the deed conveying full title to the property and all
belongings to the Foundation,” an eyewitness to the transaction later
said.
The stroke of the pen at that emotional moment ended a long, often bitter, saga that had begun in 1909 when a national movement led by the socialite and Jefferson acolyte Maude Littleton grew up to take Monticello from Levy (above) and turn it into a government-run house museum. Levy pushed back against the move vehemently. “When the White House is for sale, then I will consider an offer for the sale of Monticello,” he once said.
The battle over the ownership of Monticello dragged on for nearly five years. It included bombastic congressional committee hearings on legislation that would have condemned Monticello and given it to the federal government. Jefferson Levy—who was a. U.S. congressman from New York at the time—and his allies fought it out with Mrs. Littleton (as she was referred to in the press) and her forces on Capitol and in the press.
The congressional maneuvering began in the summer of 1912 and didn’t end until the U.S. entered World War I in April 1917. Three years after the war ended, in 1921, Levy put Monticello officially on the market after he had suffered big business losses.
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After the sale, things did not go exactly smoothly in the fundraising
department for the Foundation, a situation I touched on in Saving Monticello.
Here are some additional details that didn’t make it into the book:
After opening Monticello
to the public early in 1924, the Foundation barely managed to scrape up the
second $100,000 installment on June 30 that year. And things didn’t get better
on the fundraising front after that. With funds only trickling in and expenses
to maintain and run the property mounting, the Foundation found itself in
default on June 30, 1925, when it was unable to come up with the next $100,000.
Jefferson Levy had died on March 6, 1924. His sister and executor Amelia Mayhoff could have foreclosed on the mortgage, but she agreed instead to give the Foundation until December 1, 1930, to make the next payment. The Foundation managed to come up with the $100,000 installment in October 1930, the second year of the Great Depression.
Several large contributors came to the Foundation’s aid. The largest donation was from TJMF board member Felix Warburg (below), the big New York banker and philanthropist, who wrote a check for $20,000, the equivalent of around $495,000 in 2025.
As the Depression wore on, the Foundation remained in debt as its income continued to lag behind the expenses it needed to preserve and maintain Monticello. By the summer of 1932, the Foundation’s debt had risen to about $127,000. Things looked dire.
How dire? In August that year TJMF President Stuart Gibboney
put out a public call for financial help—what one New York newspaper called “an
emergency appeal,” for donations to stave off a potential bankruptcy and a
public sale of the property.
The Depression, Gibboney said, “has continued so
long that we now face the serious problem of raising the money to make the payments on the mortgage and to meet the debts of the Foundation.” The “whole achievement” of restoring and furnishing Monticello, he said, “is now in jeopardy and may be lost entirely if the public does not come to the rescue of Monticello immediately.”
The public—and the Board—responded, if slowly. Early in 1935, the Foundation board seriously considered a proposal to ask the U.S. Government to acquire Monticello and turn it into a National Park. But that idea never came to fruition and private fund-raising continued.
EVENTS
& COMMERCE: I have several
events scheduled November and December, most of them on Lafayette: Idealist
General, my concise biography of the famed Marquis, and my latest 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.
I’m also doing talks, podcasts, and other
events for the new paperback edition of Lafayette: Idealist General and,
of course, Saving Monticello. Many are speaking engagements for historic
preservation and other groups. Most are open to the public. For details, go to: marcleepson.com/events
If you’d like to arrange a talk on The Unlikely
War Hero, Saving Monticello, Lafayette, or any of my other
books, please email me at marcleepson@gmail.com
To order signed
copies from my website, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering
You can read back issues of this newsletter at http://bit.ly/SMOnline
