Saving Monticello: The Newsletter
The latest about the book, author events, and more
Editor - Marc Leepson
Volume XXII, Number 9 September 2025
EXCELLENT MANAGEMENT: Pop quiz: Can you name the non-enslaved person who lived at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello for the longest period of time in the house’s long history?
If you said Thomas Lionel Rhodes, you are correct.
Jefferson Monroe Levy hired Tom Rhodes as his on-site superintendent at Monticello in October 1887 and he wound up living and working on the mountaintop for the next 57 years until he retired in 1944. He died in 1953 in his 90th year.
Tom Rhodes (below, in a 1930s newpaper photo) was the seventh superintendent Jefferson Levy hired after he bought out his uncle Uriah Levy’s other heirs and purchased Monticello in 1879 when the property was in terrible condition after 17 years of neglect UPL’s heirs wrangled over the fate of the property.
Choosing Rhodes turned out to be a very fortuitous event in Monticello’s history. By all accounts, the 26-year-old Albemarle County (Va.) native was a tireless worker and a passionate advocate for the preservation and protection of Jefferson’s architectural masterpiece and its grounds. With Jefferson Levy paying the bills, Tom Rhodes spent more than 35 years overseeing the work on the ground repairing, restoring, and preserving Thomas Jefferson’s “Essay in Architecture.” He continued that work after Levy sold Monticello to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation in 1923.
“Monticello profited for over half a century from the inspired, devoted, indefatigable labor and financial sacrifice of Tom Rhodes,” Theodore Fred Kuper, a founder and former national director of the Foundation, said in 1955.
“Every bit of work on the buildings, in the rooms or on the grounds was done under [his] personal direction.”
In the years after 1923 “when the Jefferson Foundation found it difficult to raise the needed funds, Tom Rhodes understood and voluntarily postponed the time for the modest payments due him for his work.”
Thomas Rhodes was born June 11, 1863, at Rhodes Mill, in Ivy, Virginia, six miles outside of Charlottesville, the son of Madison and Harriet Marr Rhodes. Madison Rhodes was a barrel manufacturer who served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War.
His son had a rudimentary education and began working full time at the age of twelve. He specialized in farm management and had run Morsebrook Farm in Albermarle County for 14 years before going to work at Monticello.
Levy hired him in 1887 to oversee the house, grounds, and farming operations at Monticello, where Tom Rhodes found his life’s work. That also included maintaining a large vegetable garden, berry patches, and grapevines.
As I noted in Saving Monticello, soon after he came to live and work at Monticello, Tom Rhodes married Junietta Cressey. They had a son, Frederick Hall Rhodes, who was born July 19, 1891, and brought up at Monticello.
In April 1898, the Charlottesville Daily Progress reported favorably on the work Tom Rhodes had done on the grounds.
“The banks on either side of the drive from the porter’s lodge to the mansion have been sewn with grass seed, and at intervals rare and beautiful flowers have been planted, which are now blooming,” the article said.
“The lawns are in perfect sod and on them are late acquisitions of flowering shrubs.”
The newspaper reported that Rhodes had planted large crops of wheat, oats, and corn on the mountaintop, and that he was overseeing construction of a driveway on Monticello’s [Rivanna] river side.
“There are to be many more costly improvements which will further beautify this magnificent estate,” the paper said. “Everything about the place gives evidence of excellent management.”
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Thomas Rhodes, left, in a newspaper photo receiving a gold
watch from Stuart Gibboney, the president of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial
Association, on January 1, 1938, marking his 50th year (in 1937) as
Monticello's superintendent |
One stain on Rhodes’ management of Monticello was his steadfast allegiance to the tenets of the Confederate cause, which lasted into the 1920s. The son of a man who fought for the South during the Civil War, Tom Rhodes flew a Confederate flag in front of the house and had separate restrooms on the mountaintop for Blacks and whites.
Fred Kuper put a stop the display of the Confederate Battle Flag as well as Rhodes’ discriminatory policies, soon after the Foundation bought the property from Jefferson Levy in late 1923. “I am very proud to add that, on my instructions to Rhodes,” Kuper later said, “all visitors to Monticello were to be received and treated regardless of color, nationality, religion, etc., and that there was to be no segregation even in toilet facilities, which were to be solely for ‘gentlemen’ and ‘ladies.’”
Thomas Rhodes died at 89 on January 27, 1953, at a nursing home in Charlottesville where he had been living since his retirement nine years earlier. He is buried in Riverview Cemetery in Charlottesville alongside his wife Junietta.
EVENTS & COMMERCE: I have a good number of events scheduled this fall, most of them on Lafayette: Idealist General, my newly re-released 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 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
