August 2026

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”

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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.

1930 postcard: The large sign reads, in part: “Monticello: Home of Thomas  Jefferson, Open Sundays and Week Days.”

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.