The Levys of Monticello (February/March 1978 | Volume: 29, Issue: 2)

The Levys of Monticello

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Authors: Annabelle Prager

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February/March 1978 | Volume 29, Issue 2

Visitors to Monticello today, taking in its handsome lawns and flower beds, its beautifully finished and furnished rooms, its immaculate floors and woodwork, have no trouble picturing Thomas Jefferson entertaining such luminaries as Lafayette and Washington on these elegant premises. Yet if they could suddenly turn back the clock a hundred years, they would witness an astonishing and shocking transformation. In 1878 there were pigpens among a jungle of weeds on the front lawn; loose shutters banged in the wind before broken windows; bins of grain cluttered the otherwise empty drawing room; the back portico was so nearly buried beneath dirt and rubbish that horses and cattle could go right into the house; and clumps of grass sprouted among the splintered shingles of the leaky roof.

Monticello was saved from ignominious ruin because it had the good fortune to fall into the hands of men who believed that its builder, Thomas Jefferson, was the greatest of all Americans. To these owners—first, Uriah Phillips Levy, and later his nephew, Jefferson Monroe Levy-Monticello was a shrine.

“All my wishes end where I hope my days will end-at Monticello,” Jefferson had said. And there his days did end, on the Fourth of July, 1826, at the venerable age of eighty-three, as the nation celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. He died believing that his most fervent wish for Monticello was assured of coming true: that his many debts would be paid and that his daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, would live in the house. Unfortunately, while it was true that well-wishers had raised a fund to secure Monticello for her, there was too little money available to maintain it. The following year Mrs. Randolph sold many of the furnishings, and soon after put the place on the market. At first, the asking price was $70,000. But in Virginia most of the people who might have wanted it were land-poor; and among people of wealth, Jefferson, the egalitarian, was not a particular favorite. There was no clamor to own the great man’s house for reasons of sentiment.

Besides, Monticello as a family house was something of a white elephant. Jefferson had built it to his own, very personal taste. Not everyone would share his enthusiasm for two, narrow, cramped staircases instead of a single main one; or for a master bedroom where the bed was rather oddly wedged in an opening between bedroom and study, with a tiny clothes closet above it, reached by steep stairs. The kitchen was in the basement, far from the dining room; and on the second floor, the beds in all the bedrooms were recessed in alcoves-a pretty arrangement, but very hot in summer. Because the stairs were so narrow, all sizable objects, such as baggage, had to be hoisted to the second floor by way of the balcony that overlooked the entrance hall, or through the windows.

In the winter of 1830, while the house stood empty, the