"Strange and Ironic Fates of Jefferson's Daughters"

[L Verge]

This gives me a good opportunity to wrap up the story of Monticello that I began back in another thread. When Thomas Jefferson died, the home went to daughter Martha and her husband, Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr. (upper crust but a ne'er-do-well). Shortly thereafter, Martha left her husband and took her children to live in Boston. The house was unoccupied most of the time and fell into ruin as sightseers roamed through it and souvenir hunters took anything that they could move.

Martha could not pay the debts that her father had left her with and was forced to put Monticello up for sale. She asked for between $15,000 and $20,000, but finally settled for $4700 for the home and 273 acres when offered by a James Turner Barclay of Staunton, Virginia, in 1831. The purchase did not include the family graveyard.

Barclay wanted the estate for his silkworm business and cared less about the house. In fact, it is said that the man hated Thomas Jefferson. His business did not do well, and he disliked all the uninvited visitors. Within five years, he sold the estate to a Jewish navy officer, Uriah Phillips Levy, for only $2500. Those of you who read the Surratt Courier may remember an article I did in the August issue about what Lincoln's White House was like. In that, I mentioned a statue of Jefferson that stood on the grounds of the Executive Mansion from the 1840s to about 1875. Levy is the man who commissioned that statue.

Levy loved the sea, so he did not spend a lot of time at his new home. He moved in a caretaker by the name of Joel Wheeler, who promptly opened the doors to anyone willing to pay him two bits for a tour. When the Civil War began, the Confederacy seized Monticello and anything remotely attached to it. Soldiers regularly chipped pieces off the home and Jefferson's tombstone and scrawled their names on convenient walls. When the Union seized the area, Gen. Sherman assigned guards to protect the property from further damage.

By late-1864, the Confederacy needed money any way they could get it and auctioned off Monticello. It was purchased by Confederate Lieutenant Col. Benjamin Franklin Ficklin (one of the First Families of Virginia) for $80,500 Confederate dollars. When the war ended, it was deemed that Ficklin's side had lost, so he had no right to the property. It was confiscated, but Uriah Phillips Levy had died in 1862, leaving Monticello to the U.S. federal government. His will stipulated that the place was to be used as an agricultural school for training children to be practical farmers - and the children had to be sired by warrant officers of the U.S. Navy whose fathers were dead. Levy's family protested the will and won.

By this time, the property was severely neglected and the house had been ransacked by vandals. In 1866, a newspaper reported that the home was "a deserted ruin, its occupants being a freedman and his family" and "everything about the place is rapidly going to decay." By 1879, the Levy family put the place back on the auction block, and the winning bid of $10,050 was given to the original Levy's nephew, Jefferson Monroe Levy. He welcomed tourists, but ran it as a museum business while his family lived on the estate and made many improvements.

In the 1890s, however, the nation began to seriously think about the national treasures that they were losing. Mount Vernon was becoming a success story, so a movement began to save Monticello for the country. By 1912, a New Yorker by the name of Maud Littleton decided that it should be a shrine to Jefferson and began to petition the Levy family to sell. Jefferson Levy was now a New York Congressman and did not want to sell. The dickering/bickering began on a national scale, and Levy finally agreed to sell in 1914, but wanted $500,000 and a stipulation that the home would be a retreat for Presidents to use.

Another foundation was formed and raised $100,000 for a down payment in 1923. They continued to receive national pledges, but the mortgage was never paid off until 1940. Major renovations were made in 1953-54 while the estate was closed to the public. The family graveyard had been formally deeded to Thomas Jefferson's descendants in 1923.

Anyone who has visited - even since 1980 - knows the wonders of what has been accomplished at Thomas Jefferson's beloved home. It is well-worth a trip to the beautiful foothills of Virginia to see the house, its dependencies, its grounds, and to learn from the genius of Jefferson The Man. And I, for one, don't care if he fathered children by Sally Hemmings. He gave far more to our country in democratic principles that need to be remembered today.