Volume XXIII, Number 7
THE GRAVEYARD: Many visitors to Monticello get a glimpse of Thomas
Jefferson’s granite obelisk tombstone in the family burial ground, known as the
Monticello Graveyard, as their shuttle bus makes the short return trip from the
house on the mountaintop down to the Visitors Center, passing by the gated cemetery
about 750 feet from the house.
The reason for the
locked gate is that the Monticello Graveyard is not owned by the Thomas
Jefferson Foundation, the nonprofit that acquired Monticello in 1923 and has
operated the property ever since.
The family graveyard did not convey with the property when
the heirs sold Monticello in 1831 to James Turner Barclay. And it has stayed in
the family’s hands through the ownership of Uriah P. Levy (1834-62), Levy’s
estate (1862-1879), and Jefferson M. Levy, from 1879 when he bought out his
uncle’s other heirs and took control of the property, to 1923, the year he sold
it to the Foundation.
The graveyard today is the property of the Monticello Association, a nonprofit group of Jefferson descendants, which has owned and superintended it since 1913.
What follows is a short history of the notable events—and
there were more than a few—involving the graveyard and Thomas Jefferson’s tombstone,
sometimes referred to as his monument, which Jefferson designed, but wasn’t placed
in the cemetery until 1833, six years after his death.
Several of the events, including a fascinating one I only
recently came across, took place during the Levy Family’s 89-year ownership.
The most unfortunate graveyard happenings began soon after
the tombstone was put in place when rapacious souvenir hunters began showing up
on the mountaintop, making their way to the graveyard, and taking chippings
from the tombstone.
The chipping got so out of hand that in 1837, three
years after Uriah Levy bought Monticello, he had the part of the gravestone containing
the Jefferson’s epitaph removed and stored inside the house for safekeeping.
Soon thereafter, Levy turned the epitaph over to Thomas Jefferson Randolph,
Thomas Jefferson’s grandson and co-executor of his estate. Jeff Randdolph took
it to his house on nearby Edgehill plantation, the 240-acre property his other
grandfather, Thomas Mann Randolph, Sr., bequeathed to his parents, Martha
Jefferson Randolph and Thomas Mann Randoph, Jr.
Jeff Randolph also had a nine-foot-high brick wall installed around the graveyard at Monticello and a huge iron fence placed in front of the tombstone to block unwanted visitors’ views. You can see the part of the brick wall and the fence in the photo below taken around 1871 of a visitor facing Jefferson’s chipped tombstone, minus the section with the inscribed epitaph.
The brick wall and fencing in the late 1830s, however, did
not completely keep unwanted visitors out of the graveyard.
In 1853, as I noted in Saving Monticello, the noted journalist and historian
Benson Lossing, in an article that appeared in the July issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, described
a visit he recently had paid to Monticello. At Jefferson’s grave, he said, he found
the remnants of the granite monument “shamefully mutilated” by thieving
visitors.
A visitor in the summer of 1864, Sarah Strickler, an
Albermarle Female Institute student, described the effects of “relick” hunters
on the entire property, and pointed out that Jefferson’s graveyard suffered “from
the same want of attention that the house and grounds do.”
In, 1878, the year before Jefferson Levy bought out the other
heirs and took control of the property, the U.S. Congress took up the matter of
funding a new monument for Jefferson’s grave. But the proposed
legislation had a big string attached: Congress would fund a new monument only
if the family turned the cemetery over to the government. That legislation never
became law.
In 1880, a year after Jefferson Levy bought Monticello, a Washington
Post gossip columnist reported that people continued to take souvenir
chippings from the grave markers. The
graveyard, she wrote, “is a desolate, weed-overgrown place, and the tombs,
especially that of Mr. Jefferson, have been woefully mutilated by relic
collectors.”
In 1882, Congress finally took action, this time appropriating $10,000 for a new, much larger monument, this one with no strings attached, to replace the original gravestone (in photo below), which by then had been so mutilated was almost completely unrecognizable.
It took eight years, but in April 1883, a team of ten
horses carried a new, 16,000-pound monument—the obelisk we see today—from
Washington, D.C., to Charlottesville and up to the mountaintop and installed it
in the graveyard.
I recently came across a newspaper article from August 1884 I’d
never seen, in which Jefferson Levy is quoted at length on the graveyard
situation. In it, Levy vehemently refutes what he calls false allegations
that he was not protecting the graveyard from chipping vandals.
The contention, he said, that “no guard or protection was kept over the
grave are incorrect. I keep servants purposely to guard the graveyard, whose
duty it is to pass and inspect [it] every hour of the twenty-four hours of the
day and I am now about to erect a lodge at the main gate.”
What’s more, Levy said, “I have offered $500 reward for the detection and
conviction on any person found destroying, trespassing, or defacing the
monument or graveyard of Thomas Jefferson,” he told The Ithaca (N.Y.) Democrat.
He went on to say that he had initiated a “double guard” to “watch the grave
and register the names of all visitors entering the Monticello grounds.”
Soon after the new
gravestone was put in place, several individuals and institutions offered to
house the old one. In 1885, the Jefferson descendants met and chose to
bequeath the tombstone and the plaque with the inscriptions to the University
of Missouri—a state that admired Thomas Jefferson so much it named its capital
Jefferson City.
It stands today (below) in The Quad in front of the university’s chancellor’s residence in the center on the Mizzou campus in Columbia, Mo., along with a reproduction of the marble plaque.
In 1912, Jefferson Levy faced another round of accusations
about the graveyard’s condition. This time the accuser was Maud Littleton, who
was mounting a campaign to have the government take Monticello from Levy and
turn it into a house museum.
Among other things, Mrs. Littleton (as she was referred to
in the press) falsely accused him of not allowing visitors to get close to
Jefferson’s grave. Or, as she put it in a widely distributed booklet: “No human
being has the right to go there, except Mr. Levy and the Randolph
family.”
Jefferson Levy shot back at that accusation, along with
others that he let the graveyard become “overgrown with weeds,” as one of Maude
Littleton’s supporters wrote.
Levy’s reply: “At little or no inconvenience for a
generation and more—ever since I arrived at maturity—Jefferson’s grave and the
monument erected by Act of Congress, have been most carefully and zealously
protected.”
The last act in the graveyard/gravestone drama came in 1923, just before the December sale of Monticello to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. That’s when Jefferson Monroe Levy donated an additional half-half acre of land adjacent to the graveyard to the Monticello Association to be used as a future burial ground for Jefferson descendants.
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