May 2026

 

 

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

April 2026

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

Volume XXIII, Number 4                                                      April 2026

THE VILLAGE: When I give talks on Saving Monticello and get to the point of explaining how Uriah Levy, a U.S. Navy Lieutenant, had the financial wherewithal to buy Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in 1834, I explain that he had invested in real estate in a farming village that was part of New York City in the late 1820s. And that soon thereafter artists and artisans began moving to that part of lower Manhattan and the streets were paved in that part of the city known as Greenwich Village.

Uriah Levy, in 1828, bought three rooming houses, commonly known then as boarding houses—apartment-like buildings in which renters had individual rooms and shared kitchen facilities—in the Village, two on Duane Street and one on Greenwich Street.

Levy then went on a buying spree, acquiring more rooming houses in the Village and elsewhere in lower Manhattan. 

Over the next 20 years, he amassed a not-inconsiderable fortune through his New York City rooming house and other real estate holdings. In 1855, U.P. Levy—as he listed on the NYC tax rolls—had become one of the wealthiest men in Manhattan with an estimated wealth of some $500,000, an enormous sum in the mid-nineteenth century.

At the time of his 1862 death, in addition to Monticello and its surrounding acreage, Uriah Levy owned more than two dozen properties in New York, primarily rooming houses and other residential real estate in Greenwich Village. He owned buildings on Duane, Division, Canal, Houston, McDougal, Thompkins, Greenwich, Rivington, Broome, Crosby, Prince, Houston, Macdougal, Sullivan, and Thompson Streets, and one on 1st Avenue. You can see some of them listed in the above screenshot of an online image of the NYC Office of Receiver Tax’s list of UPL’s properties in the year of his death.

Many of those properties are long gone, as is the townhouse where Urial Levy lived at 107 St. Mark’s Place near 1st Avenue, which was demolished. It’s the site today of a 48-unit, six-story apartment building that went up in 1920.

Speaking of vintage Greenwich Village real estate, I recently learned that the oldest house in the village—and one of the oldest surviving structures in New York City—is the Isaacs-Hendricks House, a one time “free-standing, Federal style farmhouse with yard,” according to the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation’s “Off the Grid” blog.  

The house (above) sits at the corner of Bedford and Commerce Streets, a block from 7^th Avenue in the West Village. It was built in 1799, and has been enlarged several times since, including the addition of third floor in 1928.

Wholesale merchant Joshua Isaacs, who built the house, sold it to Harmon Hendricks, a copper mill owner and merchant, in the early 1800s who was a contemporary of Uriah Levy’s.

Part of the Greenwich Village Historic District and designated a New York City Landmark in 1969, the Isaacs-Hendricks house was sold last year. The price: $1.25-million.     

MORE MANAGERS: I devoted the entire March 2026 issue to new information I learned from Sam Towler. An independent researcher in Charlottesville, Sam has uncovered loads of information over the years on the people who lived and worked at Monticello during the Levy Family’s ownership—and has regularly shared it with me.

I wrote in March about Sam’s recent discovery that a man named Minor Houchins (whom I did not run across when researching the book), was Uriah Levy’s first farm manager, mostly likely from 1836, when Levy took control of the property, to 1849. Ira C. Garrison succeeded Houchins in that role, probably in 1850. Sometime after Garrison joined the Confederate Army in 1861, Joel Wheeler took over, and stayed until 1879 when Jefferson M. Levy bought out the other UPL heirs and became the owner of the property.

Sam subsequently emailed me with information on the farm manager/overseer situation under Jefferson Levy’s ownership, which he gleaned following his latest deep dive into Albemarle County wills, lawsuit depositions, tax records, letters, Census data, and other primary source materials.

In Saving Monticello, I wrote that after Jefferson Levy “evicted Joel Wheeler” in 1879, he “went through six overseers at Monticello” in the next ten years before he hired “his seventh, 26-year-old Thomas L. Rhodes.” But I never found out the names of the six overseers/managers.

Sam discovered three of the names, as well as other new information, including the fact that Jefferson Levy did not fire Joel Wheeler.

The proof: Levy did not gain title to Monticello until March 1879 and Wheeler, Sam found, had been gone from the mountaintop since at least January of that year.

That’s when George Carr, the Charlottesville lawyer who was the executor of Uriah Levy’s estate, hired Jefferson Levy’s father Jonas Levy (one of Uriah brothers) to be the Monticello farm manager.

Then, in 1883, a local man, Thomas H. Rhodes (who likely was related to Thomas L. Rhodes) replaced the peripatetic Jonas Levy (he moved a lot) as Monticello’s farm manager. T.H. Rhodes lasted about a year, then gave way to Edward C. Garrison, who probably was related to Ira C. Garrison.

The Albemarle Property Book lists at least five other men as owning property (mostly livestock) at Monticello during those years. Each one may have managed the farm at one point: John C. Wells, John B. Andrews, A.M. Estes, Claudius E. Whitlock, and John W. Porter. Of that group, Sam believes that John Wells likely was the farm manager at one point, but it’s much less certain that any of the others did more than graze cattle on the property.

What we do know for sure, and what I reported in Saving Monticello, is that Jefferson Levy hired Thomas L. Rhodes in 1889 and he would stay on as Monticello’s overseer for some five decades. He is given credit for being a tireless worker and a passionate advocate for the preservation and protection of Jefferson's architectural masterpiece.

EVENTS & COMMERCE:  I am scheduling 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 

To order signed copies, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering

March 2026

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

 

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson 

 Volume XXIII, Number 3                                                 March 2026 

MANAGERS & OVERSEERS: The biggest challenge I faced doing the research for Saving Monticello in the late 1990s came when I realized that Uriah Levy did not keep a diary or journal. Or if he did, I never found them, nor has anyone else who’s written about Levy before or after my book came out in 2001. 

What’s more, I found only a handful of letters Levy wrote. And, in them, he wrote precious little about Monticello, which he bought in 1834 and owned until the day he died 1862. 

 On the plus side, I unearthed a great deal of useful primary-source material on UPL and Monticello—mainly contemporary newspaper and magazine articles; official state, military, real estate, and other documents; and letters written by Martha Jefferson Randolph and her daughters, by visitors to Monticello; and by other members of the Levy family during Levy’s tenure. 

 Using those and other sources, I was able to identify two men who served as Uriah’s farm managers at Monticello, a man identified in letters only as “Mr. Garrison,” and Joel Wheeler, who took over after him. But the sources I found did not reveal exactly when Garrison or Wheeler started at Monticello, nor when they left, though it appeared that the latter departed the mountaintop either just before or after Jefferson Levy took possession in 1879.

I only recently learned more details about Garrison and Wheeler—including Garrison’s first and middle names—through the work of the indefatigable Sam Towler. An independent researcher who lives in Charlottesville, Sam has had a special interest in the people who lived on the mountaintop during Uriah Levy’s ownership and the years after he died. He has spent countless hours and many years searching official Albemarle County records, including real estate documents, wills, birth records, and lawsuits, and has identified a good number of people—including members of enslaved families—who lived and worked at Monticello during that time. 

 Sam has kindly shared his research with me over the years. In February, he emailed to let me know that he had recently learned that a man named Minor Houchins most likely was Uriah Levy’s first farm manager (sometimes referred to as an overseer), as well as the approximate dates of Ira Chapman Garrison’s tenure working for Levy. 

 According to an 1849 lawsuit deposition Sam uncovered, Minor Houchins, who was born in 1811 in Albemarle County, described himself as “the manager and agent for Capt Levy” in 1837. So, it’s quite likely that Houchins started working for Levy in 1836, the year the then U.S. Navy lieutenant had officially taken title to Monticello. As I learned when researching the book, Uriah Levy had signed a contract with the then-owner of Monticello, James T. Barclay, to buy the property on April 1, 1834. 

But the two men immediately squabbled over the exact acreage and what contents of the house would convey with the property, and sued each other. Settling those lawsuits held up the final sale for two years, until May 1836. Which is when Levy took possession of the property and most likely hired Houchins as his overseer. 

According to Sam, Houchins continued working for Uriah Levy’s until 1849, mainly because the 1850 census reveals that Houchins did not live near Monticello that year. As for Ira C. Garrison, Sam’s research shows that he definitely was working as UPL’s overseer in 1853, but could have started the job earlier than that—which would align with the fact that Houchins was gone by 1850. Garrison (c.1819-1892), was born on Rocky Hill Farm in Free Union, Virginia, about 20 miles south of Monticello. 

It appears he worked at Monticello from 1850 to 1860 or 1861. 

The 1860 federal census (snippet above) has him listed as “overseer.” During my research for the book, I had found a June 4, 1858, letter Uriah Levy wrote to his Charlottesville lawyer, George Carr, in which he gave Carr directions for handling his “farming affairs.” In it, Levy reminded Carr that he had been given him “the power to supervise Mr. Garrison and hope you will see that he is economical in his expenditure of money and materials. He has always done well in this….” 

In 1861, soon after the outbreak of the Civil War, Ira Garrison joined the Second Virginia Artillery Regiment in the Confederate States Army. Joel Wheeler, it appears, became the overseer at Monticello in the fall of 1860 and stayed there until either 1878 or 1879 when Jefferson Monroe Levy took ownership of the property. 

Postscript: Aside from learning about Minor Houchins and more about Ira Garrison, this new information led me to realize that I made a mistake in Saving Monticello when I wrote that in 1839 Joel Wheeler, “had gotten in touch with Uriah’s siblings Jonas and Amelia when their mother [Rachel Levy], who lived at Monticello, died and they arranged to have her buried near the house.” 

I had assumed that Wheeler was the property manager at that time. Now it appears all but certain that Minor Houchins superintended the burial of Rachel Phillips Levy. Mea culpa. 

EVENTS & COMMERCE: I am scheduling 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  To order signed copies, go to BookOrdering 

January/February 2026

 

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

Volume XXIII, Numbers 1 & 2                                                          January/February 2026

GETTING WORD:  When the subject of Thomas Jefferson and enslaved people comes up, I invariably bring up the fact that the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates Monticello, has been a pioneer in telling the stories of the more than 600 people enslaved by Jefferson during his lifetime.

That pioneering effort began in 1993 when the Foundation started an unprecedented oral history project called Getting Word. The idea was to record and preserve the family histories of the African American men, women, and children who lived in bondage at Monticello.

 

Founded in Monticello’s History Department by Lucia “Cinder” Stanton and Dr. Dianne Swann-Wright, Getting Word today is more robust than ever. The program’s past and continuing work helps shape Monticello’s public programming and tours as it seeks out, preserves, and shares the stories of the enslaved people who lived and worked on the mountaintop in order to document and tell the complete story of Monticello’s history.

 

I recently had the pleasure of speaking to Auriana Woods, who has been Getting Word’s director since December 2024. We talked about the department’s work and also about slavery at Monticello during Uriah Levy’s ownership. As I noted in Saving Monticello, Levy enslaved people on the mountaintop beginning in 1836 after he took control of the property following a two-year legal battle over what would convey with the sale when he purchased the property in April 1834.

 

That situation continued until the (Confederate) court-ordered sale of all of Uriah Levy’s estate’s property in the fall of 1864, two years after his death.

Auriana Woods (below) majored in African American Studies as an undergraduate at Brown University. She received her MA in Oral History from Columbia University before joining Monticello as an oral historian for Getting Word in June of 2023.

 

That came at a propitious time for Getting Word, as the program had recently received a $3.5-million grant from the Mellon Foundation.

 

“We’re in a new chapter,” Auriana told me. “We now have a team of ten people, including contractors. Getting Word’s growth and ongoing research is only possible because of the three decades of work that the team has inherited and continues to build upon, and to steward for future generations of historians.”

 

The “crux” of what Auriana hopes to accomplish during her directorship, she said, is “investing in the hard work of tracking folks whose last names were not recorded in Jefferson’s written record. Of the 613 known individuals enslaved by Jefferson during his lifetime, less than a quarter of them were recorded with a surname.”

 

Even though Monticello is “arguably the best-documented plantation in North America,” she said, the task of finding last names remains a daunting one. But, “with thirty years of work under our belts and various digital tools to aid in our search, it is absolutely possible.”

 

Getting Word’ “began in 1993 as an oral history project aimed at documenting the family histories of Monticello’s enslaved community and their descendants, toward the purpose of producing a more complete understanding of the mountaintop and all those who called it home. 

Today, we serve as Monticello’s institutional home for the study of slavery and as the department of African American History. While Getting Word is a full-fledged, interdisciplinary research team, oral history remains central to our work, and we steward a vast archival collection of 400 interview participants and counting,” Auriana said.

 

“In the past few years, we have been working to bring Getting Word’s work to a broader audience, in both the public history field and to the general public.”

 

Getting Word regularly produces an array of public programming, workshops, and talks—most recently a Black Family History Symposium held in Charlottesville on February 7. The day-long event included panel discussions, talks, and workshops centering on the theme of “Refounding Legacies.”

The program continues to shape public programming and tours for Monticello’s half-million annual visitors, helping to uncover, preserve, and share the stories of “all those who lived and labored on the mountaintop,” as Auriana put it.

“People associate so many different ideas with Monticello; some of it accurate, some of it not,” she said. Some visitors might think of Monticello as Thomas Jefferson’s alone, “not as a plantation that was predominately home to African American families.” But after touring the site, they go home with “more nuanced understanding of this nation’s founding and who belongs to it.

“For me, that idea is what gives the work meaning and drives me forward: I believe that we would be much a healthier and more well-rounded nation if we all knew that we belonged to its history, and are responsible for forging its future.”

THE LEVY ERA

While Getting Word focuses on slavery during Jefferson’s ownership, Auriana told me that the program is doing more work than ever on the enslaved people at Monticello during Uriah Levy’s ownership, as well as on the African American guides and other staff employed by his nephew Jefferson Monroe Levy, who took control of Monticello in 1879.

“Just as you cannot fully understand Jefferson without understanding the vast majority of people who lived and labored at Monticello,” she said, “in the same vein, we cannot understand Monticello’s preservation without understanding everyone who contributed to its survival.”

Getting Word’s work, she said, “has always been about the interconnections between families, whether white or Black, enslaved or free.” There are blood and family connections to the original enslaved communities in Jefferson’s time during the ownership of the Levys.

Those families, she said, include the Hendersons, Colemans, Sampsons, Carrs, Pages, Fergusons, and Taylors. Members of those families include descendants of those who were enslaved by Jefferson, as well as late 19th and early 20th century guides and others who worked (in in some cases, lived) on the mountaintop.

“This place has such a gravitational pull,” Auriana said, and many descendants of the enslaved community “have stayed close.” That includes “people living in Charlottesville today.”

Eliza Tolliver Coleman, for example, in the photo above with her children, served as the gatekeeper at Monticello for Jefferson Monroe Levy during his entire ownership, from 1879-1923. Her husband, Thomas Coleman, who also worked for J.M. Levy, was formerly enslaved by Joel Wheeler, Uriah Levy’s last caretaker at Monticello.

As for the Levy ownership, Auriana notes that Monticello’s tour guides talk about their stewardship—the main story I tell in Saving Monticello—during every highlights tour. They also mention the Levys’ stewardship as owners, “which has allowed Monticello to be preserved and exist today, allowing us to continue to do this work.”

THE CONTEMPLATIVE SITE

 

“We talk a lot about names here,” Auriana Woods said of the Getting Word department.

There’s no better physical example of that than Monticello’s Contemplative Site, a memorial dedicated in 2023 on the mountaintop to honor and list the known names of people enslaved by Thomas Jefferson. “All of them have last names, we just don’t know them all yet,” Auriana said.

Located at the foot of Mulberry Row, the 60-foot-long steel wall contains the names listed chronologically by birthdate. Blank spaces are included to make additions as the Getting Word staff uncovers more names.

That happened in August last year when Getting Word held a private dedication ceremony commemorating their recent discoveries of the names of six additional people enslaved by Jefferson: Child, born about 1815-1819; Moses, born in February 1790; Nanny, born in 1776; Mary Ann Hern, born in late 1823; Child, born in 1802; and Robert, born about 1815-18.

“Tracking small details and reading between the lines is critical when researching Black history at Monticello,” Auriana said at the time of the dedication. “Traces of evidence can come from anywhere or anyone, and it takes the effort of many hands—descendants, scholars, and interpreters—to bring those lives back into focus.” 

More info about the Getting Word African American History department at: https://gettingword.monticello.org/

 

EVENTS & COMMERCE:  I am scheduling events for 2026, most of them on Lafayette: Idealist General and Saving Monticello. I’m also doing talks, podcasts, and other events for all of my books.

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  To order signed copies, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering

December 2025

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

Volume XXII, Number 12                                                      December 2025

THE 1879 SALE: A good portion of Saving Monticello is dedicated to the fate of Thomas Jefferson’s Essay in Architecture from March 22, 1862, when its owner since 1834, Uriah Levy, died, until 1879, when his nephew Jefferson M. Levy assumed ownership. During those seventeen years, the house and grounds were neglected and the property’s ownership in limbo. 

The reason: a lawsuit filed by Uriah Levy’s heirs against his estate contesting the section in his will that bequeathed Monticello to the federal government to be used as an agricultural school for the orphans of Navy warrant officers. 

For reasons that are unclear, Levy wanted said orphans to learn to become “practical farmers,” according to the will. And he wanted the property to be “cultivated” so that the “boys and their instructors raise all they may require to feed themselves” and their instructors.  

The idea that Monticello should be turned into a self-sustaining, government-run agricultural school/farm didn’t exactly go over well with the heirs, of which there were more than 60.  

Six months after Uriah Levy’s will was admitted to probate, on October 31, 1862, partition lawsuits were filed in New York, where Levy lived, and in Virginia, challenging the will’s directions for Monticello’s fate.  

The New York suit was filed by two New York City lawyers: Uriah Levy’s close friend David S. Coddington and Levy’s 34-year-old nephew, Asahel Levy, the son of his younger brother Isaac. Coddington and Asahel Levy were among the eight executors of UPL’s estate. Asahel Levy was among the many family members and friends named as beneficiaries in Levy’s will.  

Uriah bequeathed Asahel Levy (refered to in the will as “Ashel”) Washington Farm, a property UPL had bought in Albermarle County, Va., not far from Monticello. Levy also gave his newphew “all my Negro slaves and all my horses, cattle, stock, and crops” on the farm, along with $5,000 in cash. 

What’s more, he bequeathed Ashel “my Gold Box with the freedom of the City of New York given me by” the city. Said gold box was an ornate snuff box that the NYC leaders presented to Levy on February 6, 1834, after he gave the city a painted plaster model of a larger-than-life bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson that Levy had commissioned in Paris. “Freedom of the City” was a largely ceremonial honor akin to being awarded the key to the city.  

Uriah Levy bequeathed all of his New York City property to his wife, Virginia Lopez Levy, along with all his household furniture, “either useful or ornamental,” as the will put it. Upon her death or marriage, Uriah directed that the furniture go to Asahel Levy.  

I won’t go into the complicated details of the lawsuits, which took 17 years to wend their way through the courts in New York and Virginia. I cover the highlights in Saving Monticello. 

Suffice it to say here that during that time Monticello went into its second period of severe physical decline, as illustrated by the cover photo of the book, the oldest known photographic image of Monticello, taken sometime in the 1870s.  

The suits were settled after another of Uriah Levy’s nephews, Jefferson Levy, an extremely successful New York real estate and stock speculator and the son of Uriah Levy’s youngest brother, Jonas, bought out enough of the other heirs’ shares of the wall. That gave Jefferson Levy enough support for him to buy the property when it went up for sale at an auction held on the mountaintop on March 20, 1879.  

I provided a very short description of the auction in the book because the only primary source I could find about it when I was doing the research 25 years ago was from a short article in a Staunton, Virginia, newspaper.  

I wrote that it appeared that Jefferson Levy was the only bidder at the March 20 auction. And that his winning bid was $10,050—roughly $325,000 in 2025 dollars. And that the money went to the sale’s commissioner, who took a small percentage and then distributed the balance to the heirs. Since Jefferson Levy had bought out most of the heirs’ shares, he received a good percentage of the purchase price. In essence, he bought Monticello from himself. 

I recently found a more detailed description of the auction that strongly indicates that Jefferson Levy was not the only bidder, although the outcome was the same. A March 24, 1879, article in The New York Herald reported that “a great number of Virginia gentlemen and residents of the neighboring counties were present” at the sale on the mountaintop four days earlier. Those folks weren’t there to bid on the house, though. They showed up “more from curiosity” to see what would become of Thomas Jefferson’s famous property.  

The article said that a man from Charlottesville, S.M. Keller, opened the bidding at $5,000. But he dropped out after being outbid by Asahel Levy, who went on to make “a number of bids.” Then Jefferson Levy ended the auction with his $10,050 offer and took control of Monticello.  

Jefferson Levy would go on to repair, restore, and preserve the house and grounds; furnish the house with antiques; and acquire more acreage before selling it in 1923—44 years later—to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. 

EVENTS & COMMERCE:   

I am in the process of scheduling events for 2026, 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.

If you’d like to arrange a talk, podcast appearance, or other event 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 

 

 

November 2025

 

 Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

Volume XXII, Number 11                                                      November 2025

 AN EMERGENCY APPEAL: A group of high-powered lawyers and deep-pocketed financiers formed the nonprofit Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation on March 3, 1923, in New York City with one purpose: to buy Monticello from Jefferson Levy. After months of negotiations with the big New York City real estate and stock speculator who had owned it since 1879, the Foundation signed an option to purchase the house, its surrounding 680 acres, and all of its furniture and furnishings for Levy’s $500,000 asking price.

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. 

 “This was a very emotional scene and he burst out crying. He said that he never dreamt that he would ever part with the property.”  

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.  

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

 

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

 

 

October 2025

 

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

Volume XXII, Number 10                                                      October 2025

 

ALONG AMERICAN LINES: In my continuing effort to unearth new (to me) material about the Levys and Monticello, I recently learned of a very accomplished friend of Jefferson Monroe Levy’s whom I had never come across before: Rabbi Rudolph Coffee, a prominent early 20^th century religious leader from Oakland, California.

I discovered Rabbi Coffee (below) after reading a letter to the editor he wrote to the Oakland Tribune in August 1921—the year Jefferson Levy officially put Monticello on the market. His decision to do so followed failed efforts that had begun in 1912 in Congress to enact legislation that would have condemned Monticello and turned it into a government-run house museum.

In his letter, Coffee, 43, who had become the rabbi of Oakland’s Temple Sinai earlier that year, spoke out in favor of recent proposals for the government to purchase Monticello from Jefferson Levy. Describing himself as “knowing the present owner very well,” the Rabbi enumerated his reasons why the government should acquire the house and grounds.

For one thing, he wrote, Levy was offering the property to the government at a price well below its value, which he said was “nearly” $3 million. He also suggested that government ownership of Monticello would be the appropriate way to honor Thomas Jefferson, whom he characterized as “a great statesman” and a man with “genuinely liberal religious ideas.” 

Coffee’s main argument, though, centered on Thomas Jefferson, self-taught architect. As the Rabbi put it: Jefferson was “one of the leading, and also the first of American architects to work along purely American lines.” He credited Jefferson with creating what he called “the colonial mansion,” and wrote that there was “no better example of it” than Monticello, which he described as a “remarkable spot, with so remarkable a building,” and a “sacred treasure” that the government should acquire so the house and grounds could “belong to the all the people… under government protection.”

The government never did buy Monticello. And two years later, Jefferson Levy sold the property, along with Monticello’s furniture and furnishings, for $500,000 to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. That private, nonprofit group had been founded that year for the purpose of purchasing Monticello. The Foundation has owned Monticello since December 1923, and as anyone who has visited knows, has cared for the house and grounds exceptionally well.

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

As for Rudolph Coffee, he led a remarkable life. Born in Oakland in 1878, he graduated from Oakland High School, along with his friend, the famed novelist Jack London. He left California to attend Columbia University, earning a BA in 1900. He then studied at the Jewish School of Theology in New York, became a rabbi, and later, in 1908, received a PhD in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh.

In 1907, he had become the rabbi of Tree of Life Congregation, a Conservative synagogue founded in 1864 in Pittsburgh—and unhappily remembered today as the scene of a horrendous 2018 attack in which a man shot and killed 11 congregants and wounded six others.

Rabbi Coffee left Pittsburgh in 1915 to become the head of Social Service Department of B’Nai B’rith, the Jewish social services organization, in Washington, D.C., in 1915. He moved to Chicago later that year, along with his wife Doris and their children.

But tragedy soon struck. Doris Coffee died at 27, on January 25, 1916. Following her funeral in San Francisco, Rudolph Coffee returned to Chicago and served as the rabbi of Temple Judea for three years, then moved to Toledo to lead Collingwood Avenue Temple, before returning to the Bay area in 1921.

That’s when he took over as the rabbi at Temple Sinai in Oakland and wound up serving in that position until 1933. The temple (above), founded in 1875 as the First Hebrew Congregation of Oakland, an orthodox synagogue, had become a Reform Judaism congregation in 1910. Among its noted congregants: East Oakland resident Gertrude Stein who attended as a child. 

Coffee, Temple Sinai’s official history notes, was “a powerful speaker,” using his sermons to comment on the issues of the day. He committed himself and the Temple to causes on both the national and local levels. His passions included opposition to the death penalty and prohibition. He also responded to the growing antisemitism in the nation.”

After leaving Temple Sinai in 1933, Dr. Coffee did not return to the rabbinate. Instead, he took leadership positions in several Bay Area nonprofits. That included serving as secretary of the San Francisco Conference of Christians and Jews from 1934–39, and as a member of the State Board of Charities and Corrections from 1924–31.

In 1934, he became the first Jewish chaplain of the newly opened federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island. In 1942, he was named chaplain at San Quentin and Folsom prisons and held those jobs till his death in 1955.

Officials at the opening of Alcatraz, 1934

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

WHAT A SUIT: I often describe Jefferson M. Levy, who made a fortune as a real estate and stock speculator, as a late 19^th and early 20^th century “jet-setter.” That’s because he traveled in high style extensively in the U.S. and in Europe, entertained lavishly at his townhouse in Manhattan and at Monticello, and otherwise lived an upper-crust lifestyle.

I included a few examples of Levy’s extravagances in the book. Such as him being the proud owner of a $30,000 sable overcoat, which I read about in an article in the New York World in 1913. Levy, the newspaper’s Washington correspondent wrote, bragged that the coat was the “finest piece of sable in existence, but would not say whether he had bought the coat or someone gave it to him.”

The reporter speculated that the fancy garment might have been a gift from J.P. Morgan, the Sultan of Turkey, or the Duke of Sutherland, and went to describe the sultan and duke as “gentlemen in whose acquaintance Mr. Levy revels.”

Not in the book: an item in the society column in the Orange (Virginia) Observer from March 1891 that I just discovered with another example of Jefferson Levy’s fondness for the better things in life. According to the item, Jefferson Levy was the proud possessor of a suit that was “an exact counterpart of that worn by” Thomas Jefferson when he was the U.S. minister (ambassador) at the French Court of King Louis XVI from 1784 to 1789 when the French Revolution broke out.

The suit, the newspaper reported, “consists of a coat and knee breeches of white brocaded silk with silver sword and decorations, all set in diamonds.”

I searched online for an image of Jefferson at Versailles and couldn’t find one, so I resorted to asking ChatGPT to come up with one.

Though I’m no fan of AI, I think for historical purposes the generated image (left) is a fair representation of how Jefferson would have appeared in a white silk suit, sword at his side—though I’m fairly certain he wouldn’t have been carrying a sword around in Paris.  

When I asked C-GPT to come up with an image of Jefferson Levy in the same suit, it came up a similar image, but with a face that looked more like Thomas Jefferson than Jefferson Levy. So, no deep fake there.  

EVENTS & COMMERCE:  I have a good number of events scheduled the rest of the year, 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