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Saving Monticello: The Levy Family's Epic Quest to Rescue the House That Jefferson Built. By MARC LEEPSON. New York, London, and Toronto: Free Press, 2001. 303 pp. $22.50 cloth.
The Levy Family and Monticello, 1834-- 1923: Saving Thomas Jefferson's House. By MELVIN I. UROFSKY. Preface by MICHAEL KAMMEN. Charlottesville: Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2001. 256 pp. $39.95 cloth; $17.95 paper.
TODAY many Americans regard Monticello as one of the cornerstones of the nation. Yet few know of its occupants or fate after Thomas Jefferson died in 1826. This ignorance stems partly from the fact that professional historians focused little on historic preservation until the 1960s. Charles B. Hosmer chronicled the early movement in Presence of the Past (1965), and its dust jacket featured an idyllic painting of Monticello in 1826. While briefly examining the Levy family, which owned it for most of the following century and faced some controversy, Hosmer declared that Monticello was not "saved" until its purchase by the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation in 1923. Similarly, when UNESCO placed Monticello on its World Heritage List in 1987, it acknowledged, but did not accent, the Levys. Even until the mid-1980s, the millions of sightseers who visited Monticello learned little, if anything, about the interlude between the president and the foundation. The logical question is, Why? Marc Leepson and Melvin Urofsky answer that anti-Semitism primarily caused the omission.
Both authors set the story's common ground. When Jefferson died, deeply in debt, his beloved home was in disrepair. In 1831 a local druggist purchased it for $4,500, but in 1834 the house, more deteriorated and on a smaller plot, was sold for some $2,700 to Uriah P. Levy. One who keenly felt anti-Semitism in the...