October 2023

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

 

Volume XX, Number 10                                                        October 2023

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

 

‘100 YEARS’ EXHIBIT: The year 1923 was a landmark one in Monticello’s long history. That was the year that Jefferson Levy—who had owned Thomas Jefferson’s Essay in Architecture since 1879, and had repaired, preserved, and restored the house and grounds—sold the property to the fledgling Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. That nonprofit had formed in March with the express purpose of purchasing and running Monticello. 

The Foundation has now owned and operated Monticello for a hundred years and has commemorated its centennial with events throughout the year. That includes a terrific exhibit at the Foundation’s Jefferson Library, dedicated in 2002 a stone’s throw from Monticello. It’s called “100 Years of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation,” and is on display at the Library and online with an informing, and evocative virtual tour.

The exhibit was curated and designed by Anna Berkes, the Library’s Manager of Public Services and Collection Development; Megan Brett, the Manager of Collections Processing and Digital Initiatives; retired Monticello guide par excellence Bill Bergan; and Library volunteer Jeni Crockett-Holme, under the direction of Endrina Tay, the Foundation’s Fiske and Marie Kimball Librarian. 

Jefferson Library Main Reading Room

On a personal note, all of the above folks, and many others at the Foundation, have been strong supporters of my work since the day in 1997 that I came to the Mountaintop to do research for what would become Saving Monticello.      

Here’s the link for the virtual tour: https://bit.ly/JeffLibraryExhibit  And here’s the link for the Jefferson Library’s website with info about visiting hours and access to its extensive collection of material: https://www.monticello.org/research-education/jefferson-library 

CENTENNIAL YEAR CHRONOLOGY: As a date-obsessed, linearly-oriented historian, I felt a burning need to put together a chronology of the Foundation’s 1923 highlights. Also, FYI: the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation dropped the M-word in 2000. 

February 1923 - Gregory Doyle of Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, sets up a meeting at the Vanderbilt Hotel in New York City to discuss forming a new private, nonprofit to purchase Monticello. Thomas Jefferson Randolph IV, a great-great grandson of his namesake, representing Virginia, journeys north to meet with several wealthy and influential New York City lawyers, including Virginia-born Stuart Gatewood Gibboney. 

March 3 - A follow-up meeting is held meeting at the Lawyers’ Club in New York City at which the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation is born. Gibboney assumes the presidency of the group. Theodore Fred Kuper, a young New York City lawyer who had immigrated to this country as a young boy from Russia in 1891, is made national director with a promised salary of $50 a week. 

Early April – The Foundation announces that an agreement has been reached with Jefferson Levy to purchase Monticello and that it would soon launch a nationwide movement to raise $1 million to purchase and administer the property. 

April 13 – On the 180^th anniversary of Jefferson’s birth, a Certificate of Incorporation, or charter, of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, Inc. is filed in the office of New York’s Secretary of State in Albany. A certified copy is filed that day in the County Clerk’s Office in New York City where the Foundation would set up its offices.

The Foundation’s Board of Directors includes U-Va. President Edwin Alderman, Stuart Gibboney, Moses Grossman, and Maud Littleton—the woman who infamously tried to wrest control of Monticello from Jefferson Levy; she would resign the next month. Also on the Board: Nancy Langhorne Astor, better known as Lady Nancy Astor, a native Virginian who was the first woman to serve in the British House of Commons, and her sister Irene Langhorne Gibson of Richmond (below), the original Gibson Girl of the 1890s, the famously beautiful model for hundreds of drawings by her equally famed artist husband Charles Dana Gibson. 

Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., the son of the former president, also is named to the Board, as well as Governor Lee Trinkle of Virginia and Felix M. Warburg, the extremely wealthy German-born Jewish New York banker and philanthropist who had tried to purchase Monticello for the nation several years before the Foundation was created.

May 31 - The Foundation and Jefferson Levy sign an option for the purchase of Monticello, the 640 acres around it, and all of the furniture and furnishings inside. The price: $500,000. On that same day the Foundation is “domesticated” in Virginia, giving it the legal right to transact business in that state.

June 8 -The Foundation Board unanimously approves the contract. 

June 30 - The deed of trust is executed. Jefferson Levy gives the Monticello Association (the organization of Jefferson descendants that owns the family graveyard at Monticello) an additional half acre of land adjacent to the cemetery to be used as a graveyard for other Jefferson descendants. 

July 14 - The Foundation issues a statement making a public appeal for $1-million for the purchase price and for “the proper and effective maintenance of Monticello as a national memorial throughout all time.”           

December 1 – Jefferson Levy receives the first mortgage payment and signs the title of Monticello over to the Foundation in New York City. Fred Kuper described the scene: 

“The cash and the bonds and mortgage were delivered to Levy, and Levy signed the deed conveying full title to the property and all belongings to the Foundation. This was a very emotional scene and he burst out crying. He said that he never dreamt that he would ever part with the property.” 

December 3 - The Foundation’s Deed of Conveyance is signed in the Albemarle County Clerk’s office in Charlottesville. The news makes the front page of the next day’s New York Times. Soon thereafter, Monticello is open to the public. The Foundation hires two local African American men, Benjamin Carr and Oliver Johnston, to guide visitors through the house.

Thomas Rhodes (second from left) Monticello's long-time superintendent, whom Jefferson Levy hired soon after he took possession of the property in 1879, in the early 1920s with three house tour guides: Robert Sampson, William Page, & Benjamin Carr 

March 6, 1924 - At his home on East 37^th Street in New York City, Jefferson Levy dies of heart disease, five weeks short of his 72^nd birthday. 

1940. The Foundation pays off the mortgage. 

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 in just a few weeks. My tenth book, it’s 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.

Here’s the link for the U-Va. Press Fall Catalog with more info about the book: https://bit.ly/U-VaPressHuntland  By the end of the month, it’ll be available in bookstores, on the U-Va. Press website, and through the big online booksellers. 

EVENTS: On Sunday, October 22, I’ll be doing a talk on Saving Monticello and a book signing as part of Hadassah Charlottesville’s “Jewish in Virginia – Our Past, Our Present, Our Future” event at the Hillel Brody Jewish Center at the University of Virginia. 

The event runs from 9:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. and includes a continental breakfast and buffet lunch—and live Klezmer music. Registration closes on October 13. To register, go to: https://bit.ly/HillelHadassah 

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 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.

September 2023

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

 

Volume XX, Number 9                                                          September 2023

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

 

ISABELLA & MARCUS: In my ongoing quest to research the Levy and Nunez families, I recently came across an evocative image I’d never seen before. It’s a circa 1859 daguerreotype displayed on the John L. Loeb, Jr., Database of Early American Jewish Portraits website. It’s identified as a photographer’s studio image of seven-year-old Jefferson Monroe Levy (in curls and the dress-like shirt on the right) and his nine-year-old sister Isabella, and is in the collection of the American Jewish Historical Society in New York City.

Aside from the thrill of seeing what appears to be a photograph of Jefferson Levy as a child, coming across the image also piqued my curiosity about Isabella, whom I mentioned only briefly in Saving Monticello. To wit: that she was known as “Belle,” was the oldest of Jonas and Fanny Levy’s five children, married Marcus Ryttenberg, and often visited her younger brother at Monticello after her son Clarkson Potter Ryttenberg was born in 1881. 

According to the late Malcolm Stern’s authoritative The First American Jewish Families genealogies, Isabella was born on December 12, 1849, in Vera Cruz in Mexico where her peripatetic father, a ship captain, and his wife Fanny were living. Her younger sibling Jefferson Monroe, came along on April 15, 1852, when the family was living in New York City. Two years later, their second son, Louis Napoleon, was born in NYC. Then came Amelia, born in Washington, D.C., on June 1, 1862; and Mitchell Abraham Cass, born 13 months later in New York. 

I have since learned that on January 15, 1879, when she was 30 years old, Belle married Marcus Ryttenberg (mea culpa: I spelled his name incorrectly—Ryttenburg—in Saving Monticello), who was born in Russian-occupied Poland in January 1846 and emigrated to the U.S about 20 years later with his family. The wedding took place in New York City. Just two months later, another Levy family big event took place: On March 29, 1879, Isabella’s brother Jefferson took control of Monticello by buying out his uncle Uriah Levy’s other heirs after a 17-year legal battle over who would inherit the property. 

Marcus and Belle had a son they named Clarkson Potter Ryttenberg in 1881. The family lived in several places in New York City, moving in the nineteen-teens to a large townhouse at 17 E. 37^th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, less than a block from what is today the Morgan Library and Museum, the former home of J.P. Morgan. It also happened to be where Jefferson Levy lived.

It's likely that Isabella moved in with Jefferson Levy (a bachelor) because Marcus Ryttenberg spent most of his time, mainly in the fall and winter, in the small city of Sumter in central South Carolina, about 100 miles northwest of Charleston. Marcus ran J. Ryttenberg & Sons, a flourishing dry goods store in Sumter, along with two other family businesses. 

Marcus, his father Joseph, older brother Harry, and younger brother Abe had fled Poland and settled in Sumter in the late 1860s, mostly likely in 1867, just two years after the end of the American Civil War.

According to an 1889 article in the local newspaper, The Watchman and Southron, Joseph Ryttenberg moved to Baltimore in 1870 and his son Marcus, “the first member of this family to live in Sumter, is credited with beginning the business here.”  

The store, as one of its frequent local newspaper advertisements put it—carried an “elegant line of Dry Goods, Notions, Carpets, Cloaks, Shoes, Clothing and Groceries,” much of it brought in from New York. By 1888, the “mammoth establishment” was “by far,” another ad proclaimed, “the largest business of any house in Sumter.” 

The Ryttenbergs, who worshipped at Temple Sinai, a reform synagogue in Sumter, also owned their own brickyard on the outskirts of Sumter. “Known as the Sumter Brick Yard,” it was “one of the leading industries of the Sumter community in 1890,” the local newspaper article reported. “The brick produced was used by numerous individuals in building the city. The Ryttenbergs shipped their bricks to all points via a railroad which had constructed a branch to the yard in order to expedite the loading of the shipments. The brick yard at one time had nearly one million bricks on hand for sale.” 

One other thing about the Ryttenbergs and Sumter. Researching the family took me to the 1880 U.S. Census, which reported that the Marcus—listed as a Drygoods Merchant—and Isabelle, “Keeping house,” were living in what must have been a large house on Main Street in Sumter, along with two adult servants and the seven-year-old daughter of one of them. Then I saw something shocking. 

As you can see from the image below, the Ryttenberg Family also included an their infant son, whom they named Jefferson L. Ryttenberg after her brother. The boy was born in New York City in November 1879, and there is no trace of him in any Census, genealogy, or other record after 1880, leading to the only conclusion that the child died that year. 

Marcus Ryttenberg died suddenly of a heart attack in Sumter on September 21, 1906. He was 50 years old and the family shipped his body by train to New York City for burial. Isabella died on July 7, 1925, and is buried at Beth Olom Cemetery in Queens, where her brother Jefferson Levy, uncle Uriah Levy and other family members are buried. 

THE PIER MIRRORS: Only a handful of furniture and furnishing in Monticello today have been in the house since Thomas Jefferson’s time. They include the famed seven-day Great Clock framing the door of the Entrance Hall, the ladder Jefferson designed to wind the clock, and the striking pier mirrors also in the Entrance Hall. 

Jefferson purchased the mirrors when he served as U.S. Minister (Ambassador) to France from 1785-89, and had them shipped to Virginia in 1790. They were installed in the Parlor’s Entrance Hall sometime before 1900 and have been there ever since. 

I mention the mirrors several times in Saving Monticello, as visitors throughout the 19^th century and into the early 20^th century often commented on them. They also played a role in the legal wrangling over what conveyed with the sale of Monticello by James Turner Barclay to Uriah Levy in 1834. Barclay claimed the mirrors and the Great Clock were his. Levy sued, saying they should be part of the sale. The matter was not settled until two years later when the sale closed and the parties agreed that clock and pier mirrors would stay in the house. 

I also reported that in 1903, Jefferson Levy told a newspaper reporter in Washington that the architects then in charge of remodeling the White House had asked to buy the mirrors.

“I replied that I did not feel at liberty to part with them, even for so laudable a purpose as letting them go to the White House,” Levy said. 

“I wrote to the architects saying that I had no objection to having the mirrors copied, and I understand that this will be done. The mirrors at Monticello are beautiful specimens of the Louis XVI period, and were purchased by Jefferson in France.” 

The next time you’re in Monticello’s Parlor be sure to stop for a minute and admire those historic mirrors—not to mention the fully preserved and functional Great Clock. 

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 October. 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 still in full-time writing mode on what will be my 11^th 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 September. 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.

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.