Saving Monticello: The Newsletter
The latest about the
book, author events, and more
Newsletter Editor -
Marc Leepson
Volume XXIII, Number 5 May 2026
THE COOLIDGES:
Searching for new
online images of Monticello in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
as is my wont, I recently came upon digitalcommonwealth.org, a website
supported by the Boston Public Library. It contains countless historic photographs
and other archived items from libraries, museums, archives, and historical
societies throughout the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
To my surprise and delight, I found a group of evocative photographs
taken at Monticello circa 1898 that I’d never seen. The sepia-toned images chronicle
a visit to the mountaintop by Joseph Randolph Coolidge, Jr., a 70-year-old
great grandson of Thomas Jefferson, in the company of several unidentified women
and two employees of Jefferson Monroe Levy, who had owned Monticello at that
point for about 20 years.
Several were taken at Thomas Jefferson’s gravesite and elsewhere in
the family cemetery on the mountaintop. Others show Joseph Coolidge, who lived
in Boston, standing and sitting on Monticello’s West Portico.
In the seated photo (above), it appears that Mr. Coolidge is peering and pointing at something in his hand, but it’s difficult to say what the object of his attention is. Appearances to the contrary, I am certain that said object is not an iPhone or any other type of mobile electronic device.
Joseph R. Coolidge’s mother, Ellen Wayles Randolph
Coolidge (1796-1876), was one of Thomas Jefferson’s grandchildren, the
daughter of Jefferson’s daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, and Thomas Mann
Randolph. Ellen spent most of her formative years living at Monticello with her
mother, grandfather, and ten brothers and sisters.
She married Joseph R. Coolidge’s father, also named Joseph Coolidge (1798-1879), a member of the Boston Brahmin Coolidges, on May 27, 1825, at Monticello. They had met just six months earlier on the mountaintop during a ten-day visit the Marquis de Lafayette paid to his old friend Thomas Jefferson in early November 2024 during the former’s famed Grand Tour of the United States. Ellen and Joseph Sr. subsequently moved to his house in Boston, the home base for the rest of their married life.
As I wrote in Saving Monticello, other members of the
Coolidge Family became interested in buying Monticello on several occasions
following the death of Uriah Levy in 1862. In the late 1860s, when the Levy Family
was squabbling over who would inherit Monticello, one of Joseph Coolidge, Jr.’s
brothers, Thomas Jefferson Coolidge (1831-1920) expressed an interest in
acquiring the property. But T. Jefferson Coolidge, as he was known, was put off
by the legal morass surrounding Monticello, as well as its potential price.
Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, an upper crust financier, was,
among other things, president of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad.
President Benjamin Harrison appointed him to be U.S. Ambassador to France in
1892. That marked the second time a member of his family served in that
position. The other member: his great grandfather, Thomas Jefferson, whom the
Confederation Congress appointed to represent the newly formed USA in Paris in
1785.
In 1889, twenty or so years after T.J. Coolidge lost
interest in Monticello, and about the time Joseph R. was visiting the
mountaintop, one of his sons, Archibald Cary Coolidge (1866-1928),
made an unbidden offer to Jefferson Levy to buy Monticello. Just two
years after graduating from Harvard, 23-year-old Archibald Coolidge put up
$5,000 of his own money and attempted to borrow $30,000 from his father and
other family members to induce Jefferson Levy to sell Monticello. That effort
failed, as did another one two years later.
HARMON
HENDRICKS: In the April newsletter, in the section on Uriah Levy’s
real estate holdings in Greenwich Village, I talked a bit about the oldest standing
house in the Village—and one of the oldest surviving structures in New York
City—the Isaacs-Hendricks House. And mentioned that one of its owners, the wealthy
copper merchant, Harmon Hendricks (1771-1838, in image below), was UPL’s contemporary.
I subsequently heard from Levy descendent Rob Hoffman about a familial connection between the Hendricks and Levy families. Rob reminded me that one of Harmon Hendricks’s granddaughters, Lillian Hendricks Woolf, married Louis Napoleon Levy, one of Uriah Levy’s nephews, in 1892.
And that one of Lillian
Hendricks Levy (1868-?) and L. Napoleon Levy’s daughters, Alma Hendricks Levy
Bookman (1902-1954), was Rob’s mother Nancy Hoffman’s mother. Nancy Hoffman,
who was born in 1930, is the last of L. Napoleon Levy’s living
grandchildren.
EVENTS
& COMMERCE: I am scheduling speaking events for
the rest of the year, most of them on Lafayette: Idealist General and Saving
Monticello. I’m also doing talks, podcasts, and other events for all of my
books, including Saving Monticello. They’re listed on this page on my
website: marcleepson.com/events
If you’d like to arrange a talk,
podcast appearance, or other event on any of my books, feel free to email me at
marcleepson@gmail.com
Signed copies of my books are avalable
at https://bit.ly/BookOrdering You
can read back issues of this newsletter at http://bit.ly/SMOnline
