August 2023

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

 

Volume XX, Number 8                                                     August 2023

“The study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.” – Eric Foner

‘READ SAVING MONTICELLO’: One of the most rewarding aspects of having researched, written, and spoken widely about Saving Monticello for all these years has been getting to know (in person and online) descendants of Uriah and Jefferson Monroe Levy and of Samuel Nunez, UPL’s great-great grandfather. 

Most recently, I had the pleasure of meeting Nancy Hoffman, a grandniece of Jefferson Levy, and her son Rob for the first time in July. They had just made a pilgrimage to Monticello and stopped by for a short visit here in the Northern Virginia Piedmont before heading to Annapolis, Maryland, for a tour of the Commodore Uriah P. Levy Center and Jewish Chapel at the U.S. Naval Academy. 

Nancy Hoffman, who was born in 1930, is a grandniece of Jefferson Levy and a granddaughter of JML’s brother, fellow lawyer and real estate business partner Louis Napoleon Levy. Nancy’s mother, Alma Hendricks Levy Bookman, was one of L. Napoleon Levy’s four daughters.

Nancy—like her great-uncle Jefferson Levy, her grandfather, and their uncle Uriah P. Levy—lives in New York City. Rob Hoffman was visiting from his home in Michigan. 

The day before I had let the folks at Monticello know that the Hoffmans were on their way to the mountaintop for a visit, and the staff gave them a warm welcome. Their guide on the house tour “gave a good spiel,” Nancy later told me in an email, “and he dutifully included the Levys. He even admitted us to the dome [room] and the upstairs [bed] chambers.”

After their special house tour, Rob and Nancy took a walk around the grounds and popped in on another tour guide, Dick Ruffin  as he was concluding a tour in the post-1809 kitchen located in Monticello’s South Pavilion near the house. 

Nancy said that not long after they joined the group as the tour was ending, Dick Ruffin “launched right into the Levy ownership, unprompted.” After he did, Nancy said, “we revealed our connection and he was very excited to have the family on the premises.” So excited—and happy—that the guide exclaimed, “Oh, Hallelujah!” when Rob told him that he and his mother were Levy descendants.   

Nancy told the group that she remembers the first time she came to Monticello for a visit when she was ten years old, and was “mesmerized” when she learned that her mother and her sisters played in the  Dome Room of “Uncle Jeff’s house” when they visited as young children a generation earlier.

Rob posted a four-minute video of Dick Ruffin (below, in the light blue shirt) ending his tour talking about Uriah purchasing Monticello in 1834 and Jefferson Levy selling the property to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation a hundred years ago, in December 1923.   

It includes his reaction to meeting the Hoffmans and his recommendation to them and the group to “Read Saving Monticello. It’s a book about Uriah Phillips Levy” and the family’s stewardship of Monticello.

 You can watch the short video at https://bit.ly/ReadSMonticello

The Hoffmans’ visit to the Naval Academy the following day was “extremely special, too,” Nancy Hoffman told me. Jan Zlockie, the administrator of the Friends of the Jewish Chapel (the nonprofit that raised the funds to build the Levy Center and Chapel), arranged for them to drive onto and explore the Academy’s grounds. 

“Then we went to Friday night services at the chapel (below) and everyone we met bent over backwards to show us their large collection of Uriah memorabilia.” 

At the end of the evening, David Hoffberger, the USNA’s Chapel Facilities Manager, had a surprise for the Hoffmans. He “took us to a closet inside the temple,” Nancy said. From there, he gave us a piece of a wooden fence from Uriah’s time at Monticello. We were thrilled.” 

That rare artifact of the Levys’ ownership of Monticello is now on display in Nancy’s Greenwich Village townhouse, “near my oldest family object, an advertisement for Jonas Phillips’ Philadelphia Vendue Store from 1776,” she said.

THE HUNTLAND BOOK: The University of Virginia Press will be distributing and marketing my next book, Huntland: The Historic Virginia Country House, the Property, and Its Owners, which will be coming out the first week of September.

It’s my tenth book and my second house history, along the lines of Saving Monticello. Huntland, in Middleburg, Virginia, was built in 1834, and certainly has lots of history, memorable owners and visitors (including Lyndon Johnson when he was Senate Majority Leader and Vice President), and a triumphant twenty-first century historic preservation story. Stay tuned for more details.

Here’s the link for the U-Va. Press Fall Catalog with more info about the book: https://bit.ly/U-VaPressHuntland 

EVENTS: I’m in full-time writing mode on another book, a slice-of-life biography of Doug Hegdahl, the youngest and lowest-ranking American held as a POW in Hanoi during the Vietnam War. It will be published by Stackpole Books, most likely next fall. As a result, I don’t have any book talks scheduled for August. 

For details on events later this year, check the Events page on my website:  https://bit.ly/NewAppearances 

GIFT IDEAS:  For a personally autographed, brand-new paperback copy of Saving Monticello, please e-mail marcleepson@gmail.com  

I also have a few as-new, unopened hardcover copies, along with a good selection of new copies of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; Flag: An American Biography; and Ballad of the Green Beret: The Life and Wars of Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler.

July 2023

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

Volume XX, Number 7                                                          July 2023

“The study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.” – Eric Foner

THE MEDAL: While doing the research for my 2005 book, Flag: An American Biography, I learned about—and was fascinated by—what historians call the Golden Age of Fraternity of the 1880s and early 1890s. During that time scores of patriotic, veterans, hereditary, and fraternal organizations came into being, many of which took a keen interest in promoting the American flag. 

Most of the groups established national organizations, augmented with affiliated groups in the states. That included the National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, formally established on April 30, l889, the l00th anniversary of George Washington’s first inauguration. 

The SAR received its charter from Congress in l906. It was signed by President Theodore Roosevelt, himself an SAR member. 

The SAR, which remains active today, was formed to honor the memory of those who fought in the Revolutionary War. Membership is open only to descendants of those who served in the American military in that war or otherwise supported the war effort. 

The SAR, which had allowed women to join, changed its policy in 1890 and admitted only men. That led to the founding on October 11, 1890, of the women-only National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, the DAR.  

Jonas Phillips joined the Philadelphia City Revolutionary War Militia as a private in Col. William Bradford’s First Battalion 1777, at age 43. Which means that, as I wrote in Saving Monticello, all if his descendants are eligible to be members of the SAR and DAR. I didn’t learn that his great grandson Jefferson M. Levy became an SAR member until five years ago—and wrote about it in the newsletter’s December 2018 issue at https://bit.ly/SMNesltr

I found out that Jefferson Levy joined the SAR in 1894 after my friend and colleague Maral Kalbian sent me an image of his SAR application, which she came across while doing research in that time period. 

Last month I received another image related to J.M. Levy’s SAR membership from Jim Maples of Huntsville, Alabama. He contacted me after learning about the Levy family’s role in preserving Monticello and about my book after he bought a rare, late-1890s SAR Membership Medal on eBay. 

Jim has been collecting antique SAR Membership Medals for nearly twenty years, he told me in an email, and said that Jefferson Levy’s medal is an extremely rare one, made by Tiffany & Co. from 1890-94. 

“Most members have their membership number engraved on the side of one of the arms of the cross on the medal,” Jim told me in an email. “After wearing it for a couple of years, I remembered that it didn’t have a membership number, but rather someone’s name engraved.” Said someone: none other than Jefferson M. Levy.

What’s more, Levy had “Of Monticello” engraved on the other side, as you can see in the above photo. “I had no idea who Jefferson M. Levy was,” Jim told me, “but I began to do a little research and quickly discovered that he and his uncle had owed Monticello for some 89 years.” Which led Jim Maples to Saving Monticello, to donating a copy of the book to the SAR Library in Louisville, and to subscribing to this newsletter—and kindly giving me permission to use the images.  

THE HUNTLAND BOOK: As I mentioned last month, the University of Virginia Press will be distributing and marketing my next book, Huntland: The Historic Virginia Country House, the Property, and Its Owners, which will be coming out in August.

It’s my tenth book and my second house history, along the lines of Saving Monticello. Huntland, in Middleburg, Virginia, where I live in the Northern Virginia Piedmont, was built in 1834, and certainly has lots of history, memorable owners, and a triumphant twenty-first century historic preservation story. Stay tuned for more details.

Here’s the link for the U-Va. Press Fall Catalog with more info about the book: https://bit.ly/U-VaPressHuntland 

EVENTS: I’m in full-time writing mode on another book, a slice-of-life biography of Doug Hegdahl, the youngest and lowest-ranking American service member held as a POW in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, which will be published by Stackpole Books, most likely next year. That's Doug after and during his two-year-plus years in the Hanoi Hilton. So, no book talks scheduled for July. 

For details on other upcoming events, check the Events page on my website:  https://bit.ly/NewAppearances 

GIFT IDEAS:  For a personally autographed, brand-new paperback copy of Saving Monticello, please e-mail marcleepson@gmail.com  

I also have a few as-new, unopened hardcover copies, along with a good selection of new copies of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; Flag: An American Biography; and Ballad of the Green Beret: The Life and Wars of Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler.

The SM Newsletter on Line: You can read back issues of this newsletter at http://bit.ly/SMOnline

June 2023

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

 

Volume XX, Number 6                                          June 2023

“The study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.” – Eric Foner

 

IN HALLOWED REPOSE: Visitors to Monticello who take in the fenced-in Jefferson family graveyard about 2,000 feet from the house often presume that the small cemetery conveyed with the property when Jefferson’s heirs sold Monticello. But that is not the case. 

The graveyard, containing Thomas Jefferson’s gravesite and plots of many of his descendants and their families, was retained by the family after they sold Monticello to James Turner Barclay in 1831, five years after his death. The family continued to maintain and preserve the graveyard after Barclay sold Monticello to Uriah Levy in 1834, when Jefferson Monroe Levy took control in 1879, and when he sold the property to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation in 1923. 

Since 1913, the graveyard has come under the purview of the Monticello Association, a nonprofit founded that year. Most of its members are lineal descendants of Thomas Jefferson. 

Which brings us to a bit of drama surrounding Thomas Jefferson’s grave that I just learned about—although it happened in 1882. I discovered it while searching the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America historic newspaper archive, which contains hundreds of thousands of searchable digitized images of newspapers (mainly, but not exclusively, small and medium-sized city newspapers) from 1770-1963. 

As I was searching for potential material to use in this newsletter, I happened upon a few articles about a kerfuffle instigated in 1882 by Thomas Jefferson’s oldest surviving grandchild, Septimia, so named because she was the seventh (and last) daughter of Thomas Jefferson’s daughter Martha Randolph and her husband Thomas Mann Randolph.  

Septimia Anne Randolph, was born on January 3, 1814, and grew up at Monticello. Not long after Thomas Jefferson died in 1826, she moved to Boston with her mother and younger brother George where she continued her education at the home of her older sister Ellen, who had married Joseph Coolidge and moved north with him to Massachusetts.

Septimia spent the next ten years living with relatives and family friends back home in Virginia, in Washington, D.C., Louisiana, Florida, and in Havana, Cuba. While in Havana, she met a Scottish doctor, David Scott Meikleham. They married on August 13, 1838, at the Randolph family’s Edgehill Plantation near Monticello, then moved to Havana.

The couple settled in New York City, where Dr. Meikleham practiced medicine until his death on November 20, 1849. His early demise was a financial burden to Septimia and her four children. To make ends meet, she ran a boardinghouse, then left New York to return to Edgehill, and then moved to Washington, D.C., where she lived, as one newspaper reported, with three of her “middle-aged” children “in a humble cottage” in Georgetown, “which rents for $20 a month.” She died in Washington at age 73, on September 14, 1887.

Septimia Meikleham (in portrait below) made national headlines in the spring of 1882 when she announced that, as Jefferson’s oldest direct descendant, she’d decided that her grandfather’s remains should be disinterred from the family gravesite on the mountaintop in Charlottesville and reburied in Glenwood Cemetery in Northeast Washington, D.C. Glenwood, not far from the present-day Washington Hospital Center, is the site of the early 19^th century Clover Hill Farm, which became a cemetery in 1854 and remains one today.

The reason for the move, Septimia said, was that the Monticello graveyard had “passed out of control of the family” three years earlier, in 1879, when Jefferson Monroe Levy settled a family lawsuit over Uriah Levy’s will and took ownership of the property. That simply was not true as the graveyard never conveyed with the property and remained in the hands of the descendants of her brother, Thomas Jefferson Randolph. Nevertheless, the Glenwood Cemetery Board of Trustees agreed to accept Jefferson’s remains at its June 1882 annual meeting.

The backlash came a few days after the meeting when the heirs of Thomas Jefferson Randolph (who had died in 1875), the co-executor of his grandfather’s will, hired an attorney to oppose the move. The heirs “will not allow Jefferson’s remains to be moved to another cemetery,” the attorney wrote to the Glenwood board. He also pointed out that the graveyard did not convey with the sale of Monticello, and that T.J. Randolph’s heirs—not Septimia—owned and managed the site.  

To his credit, Jefferson Monroe Levy spoke out forcefully against Septimia Meikleham ’s proposal. He was quoted at length in several newspapers giving the history of the graveyard and making it clear he strongly opposed moving the Thomas Jefferson’s remains from the place where he let it be known he wanted to rest in peace.

“The spot where Jefferson was buried was selected by himself,” Levy said, “and there are peculiar reasons why his wishes should be respected. When Jefferson and [his close friend and brother-in-law] Dabney Carr were young men, they made an agreement that whichever of them should die first should be buried by the survivor under a certain oak tree at Monticello, which was a favorite with them both.

“Dabney Carr died in France, in the time of the Revolutionary War, and after the war was over, Jefferson, in accordance with his agreement, had the body of Carr brought to this country and buried under the oak. When Jefferson died, he expressed in his will his desire to be buried in the same secluded spot beside his friend. He also left directions as to the monument to be erected over him.

“His wife and children were buried in the same spot of ground. The Randolph family has used it as burying ground ever since.”

Newspapers throughout the country agreed with the other descendants and with Jefferson Levy, and editorialized against the move, some of them intimating that Septimia pushed for the move for financial gain. The St. Paul (Minnesota) Daily Globe, for example, editorialized on June 18, 1882, that Thomas Jefferson had “the wish that his remains might rest forever undisturbed, and it was only left for modern, mercenary ghouls to prepose to desecrate the hallow burial lot at Monticello.”

The editorial concluded: “Would it be anything short of sacrilege to remove from ground so hallowed, selected by himself, for any purpose, and especially for a mercenary one, the remains of the venerated patriot, philosopher and statesman? Let the remains rest undisturbed, in hallowed repose, ‘until the last syllable of recorded time.’”

The Glenwood Board took the hint and dropped the matter.

HOUSE HISTORY NO. 2: If you go to the University of Virginia Press Fall 2023 catalog online and scroll down the left side, you’ll get a preview of my next book. Huntland: The Historic Virginia Country House, the Property, and Its Owners, which will be coming out in August. It’s my tenth book and my second house history, along the lines of Saving Monticello. Huntland, in Middleburg, Virginia, was built in 1834, and certainly has lots of history, memorable owners, and a triumphant 21^st century historic preservation story. Stay tuned for more details.

Here’s the link for the U-Va. Press Fall Catalog; https://www.upress.virginia.edu/fall23.pdf 

EVENTS: Just one in June, a talk on my only Civil War book, Desperate Engagement, the story of the little-known but crucial July 11, 1864, Battle of Monocacy near Frederick, Maryland, and Confederate Gen. Jubal Early’s subsequent attack on Washington, D.C., that takes place on Saturday, June 17, for the Alexandria (Va.) Civil War Roundtable. 

For details on other upcoming events, check the Events page on my website:  https://bit.ly/NewAppearances 

GIFT IDEAS:  For a personally autographed, brand-new paperback copy of Saving Monticello, please e-mail marcleepson@gmail.com  I also have a few as-new, unopened hardcover copies, along with a good selection of new copies of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; Flag: An American Biography; and Ballad of the Green Beret: The Life and Wars of Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler.

May 2023

Volume XX, Number 5                                   May 2023

“The study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.” – Eric Foner

 

AN EXCELLENT MAN: As I found out while doing the research for Saving Monticello, Jefferson M. Levy, like his uncle Uriah P. Levy, was a New York City resident who did not live full time at Monticello during the years (1879-1923) that he owned it. But Jefferson Levy did spend considerable amounts of time, including many summer weekends, at Thomas Jefferson’s Charlottesville, Virginia, “Essay in Architecture” during the 44 years when he was its proud owner. 

I recently found more evidence to buttress the fact that Jefferson Levy frequented Monticello regularly, especially in the early twentieth century, in a recently digitized newspaper clipping. It’s contained in one of the massive scrapbooks of clippings of newspaper articles* in which Jefferson Levy (in a 1914 newspaper photograph, right) is mentioned in the archives of the Center for Jewish History. You can browse through them online at https://bit.ly/JMLCollectionCJH 

Said evidence: a brief, kind-of gossipy article in the May 22, 1911, New York Herald, on the occasion of JML’s “return to the halls of Congress.” Levy, an extremely successful lawyer and real estate and stock speculator, had been re-elected to the House of Representatives in the fall of 1910 and took his seat in March 1911. A decade earlier he had served in the House for one term, from 1899-1901, representing New York's 13th Congressional District in Manhattan. 

Levy, a conservative Democrat, would be “an excellent man for his district,” the article predicted, pointing to the fact that he’d had experience on Capitol Hill with his earlier term in the House, and that he therefore knew “the ropes and wires better than a new man.” 

The article went on to say that as proud as he was to be a member of Congress, Jefferson Levy was “prouder yet,” of owning Monticello, which in 1911 he had owned for more than three decades. Keeping up the “reputation for hospitality” that Monticello “enjoyed in Jefferson’s time,” the article noted, Levy “takes down a gay party of his cronies nearly every week-end.” 

I couldn’t help pondering the ironic fact that at the time the article was published and Jefferson Levy was hosting regular jolly parties at Monticello, the ardent Thomas Jefferson devotee Maud Littleton was launching her national campaign to take Monticello from him and turn it into a government-run house museum—a campaign, as I show in Saving Monticello, tainted by the stench of anti-Semitism. 

After resolving that the property should not belong to Jefferson Levy, Maud Littleton spent the first half of 1911 furthering her knowledge of the history of Monticello. That resulted in her writing and publishing “One Wish,” a sixteen-page tract mailed out to influential friends around the country that summer. That emotional plea for an end to the Levy family’s ownership of Monticello was the start of a bitter, contentious, three-year battle between Mrs. Littleton and her allies and Jefferson Monroe Levy and his supporters over who would own Monticello.

The bitterness ended in the fall of 1914 when Jefferson Levy—who once said that he would sell Monticello only when the White House was for sale—agreed to let the government have the house and its 600-plus acres, plus all its furniture and furnishings, for $500,000. That mollified Maud Littleton, but the sale never happened as Congress couldn’t come to grips with the asking price. 

All interest in Monticello on Capitol Hill ended when the U.S. entered World War I in 1917. Five years after the war Jefferson Levy sold Monticello to the newly formed Thomas Jefferson Foundation for his $500,000 asking price. 

*Those big scrapbooks, which I went through page-by-page at the Center for Jewish History archives back in pre-digital days (1999), are made up primarily of newspaper articles in which Jefferson Levy is mentioned. He employed a clipping service, a long-gone, pre-Internet business that searched for and then physically cut out newspaper articles and sent them to clients.

When I started my journalism career in 1974 at Congressional Quarterly we had two full-time people serving as our in-house clipping service. Every day they’d go through scores of daily newspapers with a red pencil searching for topics that the magazine’s and other CQ news services’ reporters were working on and then “clip” them out with a metal ruler and deliver them to us. That low-tech “search engine” had nothing on Google, but it worked very well back in the 1900s. 

MEA CULPA: URIAH LEVY’S WORTH:  In the April issue I mentioned that, as I wrote in Saving Monticello, Uriah Levy was listed as one of the wealthiest men in Manhattan in the 1855 edition of Moses Beach’s The Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens of the City of New York. And that Beach estimated Levy to be worth $500,000.

I had an email from an attentive newsletter subscriber, Harry Zimmerman, who said that while doing research for a play he is writing about Uriah Levy, he came across the Beach book and saw that the figure was not $500,000, but $250,000. 

I checked my files and he is correct, as you can see from the image of the entry below—although the comma looks like a period and the last zero somehow was dropped. How I managed to double that figure when I wrote the book more than twenty years ago escapes me. But it happened. And if the book ever goes into a second edition, I will correct that error. 

That misstep got me thinking about how much $250,000 in 1855 would be worth today. So I went online and found several inflation calculator websites. I also found out that the sites use educated guesses for pre-1913 inflation figures because the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics only began tabulating inflation data in 1913. 

I went to three inflation calculator sites, plugged in $250,000 and 1855, and they all came up with approximately the same figure: that Uriah P, Levy that year was worth the equivalent of more than $8.5 million in 2023. 

THE DOC: Steven Pressman’s great documentary, “The Levys of Monticello,” which was inspired by Saving Monticello, is making its last round of film festivals this spring. Next up is a screening in Brookline, Mass., on May 8 during the National Center for Jewish Film’s annual Film Festival. For info, go to https://bit.ly/ScreeningBoston 

EVENTS: Here are details about my May author events: 

On Tuesday, May 9, I’ll be doing a talk and book signing on the life of Francis Scott Key, based on my book, What So Proudly We Hailed: Francis Scott Key, A Life, at the McLean (Virginia) Historical Society. 

On Tuesday, May 23, the topic will be Saving Monticello for my talk and book signing for the Resident Forum speaker series at the Heritage Hunt Retirement Community in Gainesville, Virginia. 

 For details on other upcoming events, check the Events page on my website:  https://bit.ly/NewAppearances 

GIFT IDEAS:  For a personally autographed, brand-new paperback copy of Saving Monticello, please e-mail marcleepson@gmail.com  I also have a few as-new, unopened hardcover copies, along with a good selection of new copies of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; Flag: An American Biography; and Ballad of the Green Beret: The Life and Wars of Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler.

April 2023

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

 

Volume XX, Number 4                                                          April 2023

“The study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.” – Eric Foner

 

URIAH LEVY’S BUSINESS DEALINGS: People often ask me how Uriah Levy, a U.S. Navy lieutenant, had the means to buy Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello in 1834, and then oversee repairing and restoring it, and then run the house and plantation until his death in 1862. The short answer is that Levy, who was born in 1792 and started his Navy career in 1812, made a small fortune mainly through savvy real estate dealings in New York.

As I wrote in Saving Monticello, when the 35-year-old Navy lieutenant (in uniform, in the painting below, circa 1815) moved to New York City in January 1828, he began investing in real estate. That year he bought three rooming houses in Greenwich Village, two on Duane Street and one on Greenwich Street. Levy subsequently purchased seven additional rooming houses in the Village and elsewhere in lower Manhattan.  It was a propitious time to do so. 

Greenwich Village experienced a growth spurt in the 1820s. As the old farming village’s streets were paved and sidewalks flagged, the area’s population increased, property values rose and hundreds of new businesses opened. It became home to carpenters, masons, painters, stonecutters, and other blue-collar workers, soon followed by middle-class merchants and tradesmen. 

Levy amassed a not inconsiderable fortune through his New York City real estate holdings. In 1855, he was listed as one of the wealthiest men in Manhattan in Moses Y. Beach’s The Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens of the City of New York. Beach estimated Levy to be worth $500,000. He and August Belmont (1816-90), the German-born banker and diplomat, were the only Jewish people on Beach’s list.

That was the extent of my knowledge about Uriah Levy’s business dealings—until a few weeks ago. That’s when I received an email from Lori Kimball, a historian and archivist who specializes in the history of Loudoun County, Virginia—where we both live. 

Lori told me that in her work in the Historic Records Room at the Loudoun County Courthouse in Leesburg she and her colleague Eric Larson had come across two documents that showed that Uriah P. Levy had other business dealings aside from those in New York City. 

One was a May 17, 1834, Deed of Trust, in which Uriah Levy “in the Navy of the United States,” his cousin Mordechai Noah, and a man named James Monroe (not the President, who lived in Loudoun, but had died in 1831), “both of the city of New York,” loaned $6,000 to a prominent Loudoun County citizen, George Rust, and his wife Maria Clagett Rust. 

The Rusts put up three piece of property as collateral for the loan: Rockland, his 503-acre country home outside Leesburg, a parcel of land in the town of Leesburg, and a 44-acre tract on the Potomac River. They made the semi-annual 7 percent interest payments on the loan for nearly six years. Then, as a February 3, 1840, Deed of Release (in the above image) showed, George Rust paid back the principal four years later, and Levy and company released the properties. 

This fairly high-level business deal led me to two questions. Was Uriah Levy in the habit of lending money? And did he venture to Loudoun County in May 1834—about a month after he purchased Monticello? Going through my research materials accumulated over the last 25 years, I was unable to find the answer to either question.

My supposition is that it’s unlikely this was the only such loan Uriah Levy made and that he could have been in Loudoun at this time as we know that he was in Albemarle County about a hundred miles south of Leesburg in the spring of 1834. 

But that’s conjecture, and I will continue to look for evidence of Levy’s other business dealings and his travels to the northwestern part of Virginia. Stay tuned. 

Postscript: On the signature page of the Deed of Trust, as you can see in the image above, Uriah Levy (barely legibly) signed his name, “U.P. Levy of Monticello.”  

THE RIMONIM, PART II: Last month I reported on the two ornate eighteenth century silver Torah finials called Rimonim that had been at the center of a dispute between Congregation Shearith Israel in New York and Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island. I mentioned that they had been on loan to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and illustrated the posting with a generic image of Rimonim. Then I learned, through emails from attentive newsletter subscribers, that the finials are still on display at FMA, and that the Museum’s website includes a photo (below) of them, along with excellent interpretation, which provides more details about the unique—and valuable—objects. 

The Rimonims’ finial bells make “festive sounds when they are carried around the synagogue,” the museum notes. “Their Hebrew name ‘Rimonim’ means pomegranates, because of the round shape recalling the biblical symbolic fruit.

“This splendid pair, on loan from Congregation Shearith Israel in New York (est. 1654), is an exceptionally rare example of colonial American Judaica. They were made by Myer Myers, a Jewish silversmith who led the market in 18th-century New York.” Myers “produced luxury silverware for both domestic and religious use for [his] Jewish and non-Jewish clients.

“These finials hold a very special place in Jewish American history…. They were … probably in the Newport synagogue during George Washington’s famous visit on August 18th, 1790. Today the New York congregation uses the beautiful Rimonim during the High Holidays.” 

The U.S.S. LEVY: As I reported in Saving Monticello, the first time the United States Navy honored Uriah Levy’s exceptional 50-year naval career came during World War II when a destroyer escort was christened the USS Levy.

That ship, one of the first of its kind in the Navy, served in the southern and central Pacific from August 1943 through the end of the war two years later, seeing action in many engagements, including the two-month Battle of the Philippine Sea in the summer of 1944. 

In August and September 1945 the ship’s officers took part in surrender ceremonies of the Japanese Navy in the southeastern Marshall Islands. They negotiated and accepted the surrender of Mille (sometimes spelled Mili) Atoll on August 21 and witnessed the surrender of Jaluit Atoll later that month. On September 4, the Japanese officially surrendered Wake Island to Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Lawson. H. M. Sanderson aboard the Levy.

Not long after Saving Monticello came out in November 2001, my friend Julie Coles told me that her late father, Daniel F. Evans, had served as a 22-year-old gunnery officer on the ship during the war. And that he took part in the surrender ceremonies. Then, just last week, she sent me the image at left that her father kept in his scrapbook. 

That’s Daniel Evans with the binoculars around his neck, saluting one of the three Japanese officers who came on board on August 21, most likely Navy Capt. Masanori Shigaone 

Julie told me that her father said that he and Lt. Cmdr. William Clarenback (to Evans’ left) were chosen to greet the Japanese officers because they were tall men and their commanding officer Capt. Harold B. Grow wanted them there to tower over and humiliate the Japanese. 

She also said her father told her that after the picture was taken the officer committed ritual suicide. 

You can find more info on the U.S.S. Levy during World War II on two excellent, well-illustrated web sites:  https://bit.ly/USSLevy and https://bit.ly/4USSLevyPhotos  

THE DOC: Steven Pressman’s great documentary, “The Levys of Monticello,” which was inspired by Saving Monticello, continues to appear at film festivals across the country. 

On Wednesday, April 19, there’ll be an in-person screening at the Center for Jewish History at the American Jewish Historical Society in New York City. For details, go to: https://bit.ly/AJHSLevys 

We had a screening on March 14 at The Hill School in Middleburg, Virginia, where I live, sponsored by our town’s library friends group, the Middleburg Library Advisory Board. It was a great event, after which I took questions from the audience and then signed copies of the book at the best book-signing table I’ve ever had, which was set up by a local shop, Crème de la Crème. Yes, that’s a lamp, a potted plant, and two table cloths adorning the table.

EVENTS: Here are details about my four events in April:

·        Sunday, April 2, talk on Saving Monticello, and book signing at Congregation Beth Am Israel in Penn’s Landing, Pennsylvania.   

·        Tuesday, April 11, talk for the Sons of Confederate Veterans Camp, in Winchester, Virginia, on my only Civil War book, Desperate Engagement

·        Saturday, April 15, talk at historic City Tavern in Washington, D.C. on the life of Francis Scott Key, sponsored by the City Tavern Preservation Foundation. This is a free event and is open to the public, with registration required through Eventbrite at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/551699807977 

·        Sunday, April 16, talk on Desperate Engagement for the Washington, D.C., chapter of the Daughters of the Union Veterans of the Civil War

If you’d like to arrange an event for Saving Monticello or for any of my other books, email me at marcleepson@gmail.com For details on other upcoming events, check the Events page on my website:  https://bit.ly/NewAppearances

GIFT IDEAS:  For a personally autographed, brand-new paperback copy of Saving Monticello, please e-mail marcleepson@gmail.com  I also have a few as-new, unopened hardcover copies, along with a good selection of new copies of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; Flag: An American Biography; and Ballad of the Green Beret: The Life and Wars of Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler.