Saving Monticello: The Newsletter
The latest about the book, author
events, and more
Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson
Volume XVII, Number 6 June 1, 2020
“The study of the past is a
constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.” – Eric Foner
As I noted in Saving
Monticello, Amelia Levy had married Carl Mayhoff, a New York City cotton
broker, in 1890. They lived most of the year in New York City on East 34th Street, the same block where Jefferson Levy lived. The Mayhoff’s son, Monroe,
was born in 1897.
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| Sisters Agnes and Frances Levy with their cousin, Monroe Levy, on the lawn circa 1902 |
During the seasons when she was in charge at Monticello,
Amelia Mayhoff arranged innumerable social events, with and without her brother
present. She and her husband occupied a suite of rooms on the first floor.
The other family
members who spent the most time at Monticello were Jefferson Levy and Amelia
Mayhoff’s brother L. Napoleon, his wife Lilian Hendricks Wolff, and their four
daughters—Frances, Agnes, Florence, and Alma. The account I gave of their days
at Monticello in the book was primarily based on a mid-1970s interview with
Florence Levy Forsch—along with copies of hand-written letters her older sister,
Frances Wolff Levy Lewis, wrote from Monticello in 1902 when she was nine years
old.
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| Uncle Jeff |
Just last week, Frances Lewis’ grandson Richard Lewis kindly
sent me two pages from a short, unpublished memoir she wrote in the early
1960s, in which she remembers Jefferson Levy and visits to Monticello. Most of
what she writes jibes with her sister Florence’s remembrances, as well as with all
with the other primary-source materials about Jefferson Levy and Monticello during
his ownership that I’ve uncovered. But the memoir also contains some
observations that I’d not come across before.
Frances
Lewis described her uncle as a “very tall and big man,” and said that her
family visited “Uncle Jeff” regularly at his lavish New York City townhouse on
34th Street. She said that her Aunt Amelia “kept house for her
family,” as well as for her two bachelor brothers, Jefferson M. and Mitchell
Abraham Cass Levy.
She went on to give a revealing glimpse into Jefferson
Levy’s early twentieth century lifestyle.
“On Sunday mornings,” she wrote, “we would
be sent in to see Uncle Jeff, who would be lying on a big four poster bed,
surrounded by the Sunday papers and there would be two big greyhounds stretched
on the bed beside him.
The memoir confirms, as Fran Lewis put it, that during their
childhood she and her sister Agnes “often were brought down to stay a few weeks
in Monticello in the summer.” She said that her Aunt Amelia—who liked her
nieces to call her “auntie”—presided over a household with a good number of
African American “maids who lived in the old slave quarters, which were
underground outside the main house.”
Today, those quarters, known as the South Wing, house
several exhibits that document the lives of enslaved African Americans at
Monticello. The lineup includes the spectacular digital exhibit on the life of
Sally Hemings and the Getting
Word project, which tells the history of Monticello’s enslaved people primarily
through the oral histories of their descendants. There’s also the restored post-1809
Kitchen and Cook’s Room.
Fran
Lewis describes her aunt Amelia as “a smart woman and a gracious hostess to
many important people who came to visit Uncle Jeff and [who] gave many parties
in the beautiful parlor where there was a large malachite table and many fine
oil paintings.
“The
floor was highly polished and we children were never allowed to enter that room
except on one occasion when President Theodore Roosevelt came to visit [on June
17, 1903] and Agnes and I and Monroe were sent in to shake hands with him.”
Jefferson Levy, she said, “slept in Thomas Jefferson’s
room,” known today as the Bed Chamber, which famously features Jefferson’s
alcove bed. It’s conceivable that Jefferson M. Levy slept in the alcove bed.
On the other hand, a visitor
to Monticello in 1900 wrote that Jefferson Levy installed “a gold Louis XV bed”
on a “dais” in the Bed Chamber, upholstered in “damask, while voluminous
blue damask curtains draped to each side fell from a gold coronet that hung
from the ceiling.”
Fran Lewis said that her
uncle had “many” greyhounds, including his favorite, Duke, who “always slept in
Uncle Jeff’s room.”
Fran
(who was known as Fanny as a child) described some of the farming operations at
Monticello, including a “field with about 50 Shetland ponies and one Palomino,
which belonged to Monroe, who would ride him around the back lawn.”
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| Frances Lewis at Monticello, 1959 |
Thomas Rhodes, Jefferson Levy’s overseer at Monticello, also ran a diary operation on the mountain. “There were cows,” Fran Lewis said, “and in the evenings we would go down the hill to watch them be milked, and even tried to do it ourselves.”
The children also occasionally
played in the Jefferson family cemetery. “We would go down the hill and squeeze
between the bars,” Fran Lewis wrote, “and play inside. Back at the house, the
children “would chalk out a hop scotch” on the roof of the former slave
quarters. When it rained, they scampered up one of the narrow staircases in the
house to the top floor, and explored the Dome Room “where all sorts of things
were stored, including a two wheeled gig that Thomas Jefferson rode in when he
went to sign the Declaration of Independence.”
Jefferson, indeed, did drive that one-horse gig, which was
built by enslaved people at Monticello, on two six-day journeys from the mountain
to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1775 and 1776. As I noted in Saving Monticello, the gig remained
unused and unchanged after it was stowed away upstairs at Monticello following
Jefferson’s death, although its wheels and shaft had disappeared by the time
Jefferson Levy had taken over.
The house and grounds “were truly beautiful,” Fran Lewis
wrote, “as Jefferson Levy spent large sums of money restoring the house and
buying furnishings.”
That sentence is 100 percent accurate, and jibes with every
other first-person account of Monticello during Jefferson Levy’s ownership.
If
you’d like to arrange an event for Saving
Monticello, or for any of my other books, feel free to send me email at marcleepson@gmail.com For info on my latest book, Ballad of the Green Beret, go to http://bit.ly/GreenBeretBook
GIFT IDEAS: Want a
personally autographed, brand-new paperback copy of Saving Monticello? Please e-mail me. I also have a few as-new,
unopened hardcover copies, along with a good selection of brand-new copies of
my other books.
