Saving Monticello: The Newsletter
The latest about the
book, author events, and more
Newsletter Editor -
Marc Leepson
Volume XXIII, Number 8 August 2026
THE GATEHOUSE: Last
month we looked at the history of the Jefferson Family graveyard at Monticello,
concentrating on the long, convoluted events surrounding Thomas Jefferson’s
tombstone. As I was doing the research, I came across an article in the August
2, 1884, issue of the The Ithaca (N.Y.) Democrat in
which Jefferson Levy was quoted at length about the tomb situation on the
property, which he had acquired from his uncle Uriah Levy’s heirs five years
earlier.
Because vandals had taken chippings from Jefferson’s tombstone, Jefferson
Levy spoke out about what he was doing to protect the gravesite at
Monticello, owned then by
Jefferson’s descendants, and since 1913 by the Monticello Association, an
organization formed by the descendants.
Levy told the newspaper that he had employees checking on
the graveyard every two hours around the clock and that, for security’s sake,
he was “about to erect a lodge at the main gate.”
Those last words led me to try to find out more about the
Lodge, including when it was built. I knew that it dated from Jefferson Levy’s
ownership, and soon discovered that the best secondary sources only guessed at when
it was erected, saying that Levy likely had it built in the late 1880s or early
1890s. It looked like that Ithaca Democrat newspaper article was the
first primary source evidence confirming when construction begun.
I dug deeper and learned more about the Gatehouse’s history.
Also referred to as the Entrance Lodge and the Gate House, the small structure
first served as the residence of Monticello’s gatekeeper, a Levy employee
charged with greeting visitors (bidden and unbidden) to the mountaintop. For a
few years, starting in the early 1860s, well before Levy built the Lodge, enslaved
people who lived elsewhere at Monticello performed that task—and also gave
tours of the house and grounds. After the Civil War, it appears that that
practice ended.
Then, from 1885 until the 1960s, several generations of gatekeepers
and their families lived in the small, three-room structure. In 1953, the
Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation had two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a
bathroom added to the Gatehouse.
After the practice of live-in gatekeepers ended, the building
was put to different uses, including as a home for the Foundation’s Research Department
and several other Foundation entities, including its security force. As you can
see in the photo above, the Lodge today sits behind a fence alongside Route 53 (aka,
Thomas Jefferson Parkway) not far from Monticello’s current entrance.
In the fall of 2022, the Foundation replaced the Gatehouse’s
roof and did other repairs and renovations. “The original portion’s roof was
restored to its original appearance using cedar shakes,” Monticello’s
Restoration Department reported on its Facebook page that year, “and the 1950s
addition to the building was differentiated with long-lasting standing seam
copper.” After the cedar shakes weathered, they were stained “a deep red to
match fragments of original shingles found in the building’s attic”
**************
It’s noteworthy to point out that the Jefferson Levy employees who lived at the Gatehouse and greeted visitors were members of the Coleman and Henderson families who had begun working at Monticello after Jefferson Levy took control in 1879. That included Eliza Tolliver Coleman (1845-1932), in the photos above with her some of her children taken outside the gatehouse around 1912.
According to Monticello’s Getting Word African American
History Department, Coleman and members of her extended family worked for
Jefferson Levy as “cooks, gardeners, and household employees” before the
Gatehouse was built. The family members wound up living and working at
Monticello, “over the course of a century—far longer than any of the property’s
owners.”
Eliza Coleman’s
husband, Thomas Coleman (1845- c.1910), was born into slavery at Monticello. They
had eight children.
As I noted in this newsletter in 2020, the Coleman Family is
linked by marriage to the Sheltons and Hendersons—including long-time
gatekeeper Willis Shelton, who was one of the first Monticello gatehouse greeters
in 1885, and who worked for the Levy family until his death.
His grandson, Willis Henderson (1885-1966), worked for
Jefferson Levy as a cook, waiter, and house guide, and later, for Levy’s sister
Amelia Mayhoff and her family in New York City.
He returned to Virginia before Levy sold the property in
1923, and went back to work at Monticello for the new owners, the Thomas
Jefferson Memorial Foundation. He greeted visitors there through the 1960s,
including Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt in 1936.
And there’s this: As a result of finding that article in the
1884 Ithaca Democrat, the accepted date of the Gatehouse’s birth, as far as Monticello is concerned, is 1884.
One very small step for humankind, but one giant
step for historic preservation nerds like me.
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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. 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 o order signed copies of my books, go to https://bit.ly/BookOrdering You can read back issues of this newsletter at
http://bit.ly/SMOnline
Special thanks to Bill Bergen, former long-time
Monticello guide and volunteer researcher at the Jefferson Library at
Monticello, for his invaluable fact-checking and advice with the Gatehouse
history.
