Volume XXIII, Number 7

THE GRAVEYARD: Many visitors to Monticello get a glimpse of ThomasJefferson’s granite obelisk tombstone in the family burial ground, known as theMonticello Graveyard, as their shuttle bus makes the short return trip from thehouse on the mountaintop down to the Visitors Center, passing by the gated cemeteryabout 750 feet from the house.

The reason for thelocked gate is that the Monticello Graveyard is not owned by the ThomasJefferson Foundation, the nonprofit that acquired Monticello in 1923 and hasoperated the property ever since.

The family graveyard did not convey with the property whenthe heirs sold Monticello in 1831 to James Turner Barclay. And it has stayed inthe family’s hands through the ownership of Uriah P. Levy (1834-62), Levy’sestate (1862-1879), and Jefferson M. Levy, from 1879 when he bought out hisuncle’s other heirs and took control of the property, to 1923, the year he soldit to the Foundation.

The graveyard today is the property of the MonticelloAssociation, a nonprofit group of Jefferson descendants, which has owned andsuperintended it since 1913.

What follows is a short history of the notable events—andthere were more than a few—involving the graveyard and Thomas Jefferson’s tombstone,sometimes referred to as his monument, which Jefferson designed, but wasn’t placedin the cemetery until 1833, six years after his death.

Several of the events, including a fascinating one I onlyrecently came across, took place during the Levy Family’s 89-year ownership.

The most unfortunate graveyard happenings began soon afterthe tombstone was put in place when rapacious souvenir hunters began showing upon the mountaintop, making their way to the graveyard, and taking chippingsfrom the tombstone.

The chipping got so out of hand that in 1837, threeyears after Uriah Levy bought Monticello, he had the part of the gravestone containingthe Jefferson’s epitaph removed and stored inside the house for safekeeping.Soon thereafter, Levy turned the epitaph over to Thomas Jefferson Randolph,Thomas Jefferson’s grandson and co-executor of his estate. Jeff Randdolph tookit to his house on nearby Edgehill plantation, the 240-acre property his othergrandfather, Thomas Mann Randolph, Sr., bequeathed to his parents, MarthaJefferson Randolph and Thomas Mann Randoph, Jr.

Jeff Randolph also hada nine-foot-high brick wall installed around the graveyard at Monticello and ahuge iron fence placed in front of the tombstone to block unwanted visitors’views. You can see the part of the brick wall and the fence in the photo belowtaken around 1871 of a visitor facing Jefferson’s chipped tombstone,minus the section with the inscribed epitaph. 

The brick wall and fencing in the late 1830s, however, didnot completely keep unwanted visitors out of the graveyard.

In 1853, as I noted in Saving Monticello, the noted journalist and historianBenson Lossing, in an article that appeared in the July issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, describeda visit he recently had paid to Monticello. At Jefferson’s grave, he said, he foundthe remnants of the granite monument “shamefully mutilated” by thievingvisitors.

A visitor in the summer of 1864, Sarah Strickler, anAlbermarle Female Institute student, described the effects of “relick” hunterson the entire property, and pointed out that Jefferson’s graveyard suffered “fromthe same want of attention that the house and grounds do.”

In, 1878, the year before Jefferson Levy bought out the otherheirs and took control of the property, the U.S. Congress took up the matter offunding a new monument for Jefferson’s grave. But the proposedlegislation had a big string attached: Congress would fund a new monument onlyif the family turned the cemetery over to the government. That legislation neverbecame law.

In 1880, a year after Jefferson Levy bought Monticello, a WashingtonPost gossip columnist reported that people continued to take souvenirchippings from the grave markers.  Thegraveyard, she wrote, “is a desolate, weed-overgrown place, and the tombs,especially that of Mr. Jefferson, have been woefully mutilated by reliccollectors.”

In 1882, Congressfinally took action, this time appropriating $10,000 for a new, much larger monument,this one with no strings attached, to replace the original gravestone (inphoto below), which by then had been so mutilated was almost completelyunrecognizable.

It took eight years, but in April 1883, a team of tenhorses carried a new, 16,000-pound monument—the obelisk we see today—fromWashington, D.C., to Charlottesville and up to the mountaintop and installed itin the graveyard.

I recently came across a newspaper article from August 1884 I’dnever seen, in which Jefferson Levy is quoted at length on the graveyardsituation. In it, Levy vehemently refutes what he calls false allegationsthat he was not protecting the graveyard from chipping vandals.

The contention, he said, that “no guard or protection was kept over thegrave are incorrect. I keep servants purposely to guard the graveyard, whoseduty it is to pass and inspect [it] every hour of the twenty-four hours of theday and I am now about to erect a lodge at the main gate.”

What’s more, Levy said, “I have offered $500 reward for the detection andconviction on any person found destroying, trespassing, or defacing themonument or graveyard of Thomas Jefferson,” he told The Ithaca (N.Y.) Democrat.He went on to say that he had initiated a “double guard” to “watch the graveand register the names of all visitors entering the Monticello grounds.”

Soon after the newgravestone was put in place, several individuals and institutions offered tohouse the old one. In 1885, the Jefferson descendants met and chose tobequeath the tombstone and the plaque with the inscriptions to the Universityof Missouri—a state that admired Thomas Jefferson so much it named its capitalJefferson City.

It stands today (below) in The Quad in front of theuniversity’s chancellor’s residence in the center on the Mizzou campus in Columbia,Mo., along with a reproduction of the marble plaque. 

In 1912, Jefferson Levy faced another round of accusationsabout the graveyard’s condition. This time the accuser was Maud Littleton, whowas mounting a campaign to have the government take Monticello from Levy andturn it into a house museum.

Among other things, Mrs. Littleton (as she was referred toin the press) falsely accused him of not allowing visitors to get close toJefferson’s grave. Or, as she put it in a widely distributed booklet: “No humanbeing has the right to go there, except Mr. Levy and the Randolphfamily.” 

Jefferson Levy shot back at that accusation, along withothers that he let the graveyard become “overgrown with weeds,” as one of MaudeLittleton’s supporters wrote.

Levy’s reply: “At little or no inconvenience for ageneration and more—ever since I arrived at maturity—Jefferson’s grave and themonument erected by Act of Congress, have been most carefully and zealouslyprotected.” 

The last act in the graveyard/gravestone drama camein 1923, just before the December sale of Monticello to the ThomasJefferson Memorial Foundation. That’s when Jefferson Monroe Levy donated anadditional half-half acre of land adjacent to the graveyard to the MonticelloAssociation to be used as a future burial ground for Jeffersondescendants. 

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