October 2024

 

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

Volume XXI, Number 10                          October 2024

A SUMMER RESORT: The story of how Jefferson Monroe Levy gained control of Monticello in 1879 after more than two decades of legal wrangling among himself and his Uncle Uriah Levy’s other heirs is a long and winding one. And one with a surprising conclusion.

It began shortly after Uriah Levy’s death on March 22, 1862, when his heirs—more than 60 of them—discovered that the Commodore unexpectedly bequeathed Monticello to the people of the United States to be used as an agricultural school for the orphans of Navy warrant officers. 

That didn’t happen because Congress, which would have had to approve the idea, had little time to deal with a real estate matter during the darkest days of the Civil War. 

The will stipulated that if Congress did not green light that plan, Monticello should go to the state of Virginia for the same purpose. Virginia, by then no longer in the Union, took no action—even though the South had confiscated Monticello in 1861 since it was owned by a northerner. 

The will had a third contingency; if Virginia said no, then Jefferson’s Charlottesville property would go to the Portuguese Hebrew congregations of New York, Philadelphia, and Richmond to be used as an agricultural school for orphans, both Jewish and non. 

With no action on the synagogue front, family members in 1868 filed partition lawsuits in Virginia and New York (where UPL lived most of the year)—the kind often used in contested divorce proceedings—to try to clear up Monticello’s fate. That year, courts in Richmond and New York ruled that Levy’s stipulation that Monticello would become a school for orphans was invalid. The courts then ordered that Monticello should be auctioned on the premises. The proceeds would be divided among Uriah Levy’s many heirs, who were allocated shares in the ownership of the property. 

At the time of the court decision, Jefferson Monroe Levy was sixteen-and-a-half years old. 

What followed was more than a decade of more legal wrangling over Monticello’s fate. Things were not settled, as I noted in Saving Monticello, until 1879. And it wasn’t a court ruling that did it.

Jefferson Monroe Levy had in the intervening years made a fortune as a big-time real estate and stock speculator. And he decided to take the fate of Monticello into his own hands beginning in the mid-1870s, and started buying out other family members’ inheritance shares.

 In June 1875, Jefferson Levy bought the Monticello inheritance shares of Virginia Lopez Levy Ree—Uriah Levy’s remarried widow—along with those of her husband, William J. Ree. In March 1876, JML purchased his parents Fanny and Jonas Phillips Levy’s Monticello shares.

Then, in October 1876, Levy bought the shares of Virginia Ree’s brother George Washington Lopez of Spanish Town, Jamaica. By April the following year, Jefferson Levy (below) had accumulated about half of Monticello’s shares. 

It is not a matter of record exactly how much Jefferson Levy paid the other heirs for their shares. The best guess is that it was approximately $10,000—a not insignificant sum in the late 1870s. 

On February 5, 1879, Levy family lawyer George Carr, an executor of Uriah Levy’s estate, placed an ad in a Charlottesville newspaper. It announced that Monticello and its surrounding acreage would be offered for sale “at public auction, to the highest bidder on the premises between 11 o’clock A.M., and 2 o’clock P.M., on Thursday, March 20th.” 

It appears that Jefferson Monroe Levy, a month shy of his 27^th birthday, was the only bidder at the March 20 auction. His winning bid was $10,050. That money was distributed to the other heirs.

But since Levy had bought out large portions from some of the other heirs, he received a good percentage of the purchase price. Jefferson Levy, in other words, had more or less bought Monticello from himself. 

CORRECTION: In last month’s newsletter I mentioned in passing that a full-length portrait of Uriah Levy in his Navy uniform (right) that had hung in Monticello was on display at the U.S. Naval Academy’s Museum in Annapolis. Jefferson Monroe Levy’s sister Amelia Mayhoff, who inherited the painting after his death in 1924, had donated the portrait to the Naval Academy in 1928. She did so after the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which  bought the house from Levy in 1923, turned down her offer to keep it on display in the house.

I had forgotten that Levy descendant Rob Hoffman had told me last summer after he and his mother Nancy—a grandniece of Jefferson Levy, and the oldest surviving Levy Family descendant—visited the Naval Academy and learned that the large oil portrait was in storage, not on view. Here’s hoping it goes back on display sometime soon. 

EVENTS: Two scheduled for this month: 

On Wednesday, October 16, I’ll be doing a talk on Saving Monticello for the McLean (Virginia) Newcomers and Neighbors Club. 

On Sunday, October 20, I have talk and book signing at the Thomas Balch Library in Leesburg, Virginia, on my second house-history book, Huntland. It begins at 2:00 in the afternoon, and is free and open to the public. Registration is required, though. To do so, call 703-737-7195, email balchlib@leesburgva.gov or go to https://tinyurl.com/TBLEvents

I will be doing more events in the fall and winter, and in 2025, including talks on Saving Monticello. I also will be do talks and media interviews starting in early December 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. More info on that book at https://bit.ly/Hegdahl 

If you’d like to arrange a talk on that book, on Saving Monticello, or any of my other books, feel free to email me at marcleepson@gmail.com  

 For details on upcoming events, check the Events page on my website: marcleepson.com/events 

COMMERCE: I have brand-new paperback copies of Saving Monticello and a few as-new hardcovers. To order personalized, autographed copies, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering or email me directly at marcleepson@gmail.com 

I also have a stack of five of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; and Ballad of the Green Beret, and Huntland.

You can read back issues of this newsletter at http://bit.ly/SMOnline