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By Root 2140 0

Barclay, who tried to make it into a silk farm. The enterprise failed miserably. Barclay ran off to the Holy Land to do missionary work, and the house became derelict. Weeds grew through the floorboards. Doors fell off. Cows wandered through empty rooms. Jean-Antoine Houdon’s famous bust of Voltaire was found lying in a field. In 1836, just ten years after Jefferson died, Monticello was bought for $2,500—a paltry sum for such a house even then—by an improbable figure named Uriah Phillips Levy. Nearly everything about Levy made him an unusual owner of a Virginian estate, but then nearly everything about him was unusual anyway. To begin with, he was a Jewish naval officer—the only one in the U.S. Navy. He was also difficult and obstreperous—qualities that his superiors didn’t like to see in any naval officer but ones that neatly fed any anti-Semitic prejudices they were inclined to hold already. Five times in his career Levy was court-martialed, and five times exonerated. Of equal consideration to his new neighbors was that he was from New York. A Jewish Yankee didn’t have many friends in Virginia. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Monticello was seized by the Confederate government and Levy fled to Washington, the nearest safe refuge. He appealed to President Lincoln for help, and Lincoln, with a neat appreciation of aptness, appointed him to a seat on the federal court-martial board.

The Levy family owned Monticello for ninety years—far longer than Jefferson himself did. Without them, the house would never have survived. In 1923, they sold Monticello for $500,000 to the newly formed Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, which embarked on a long program of renovation. Not until 1954 was the work complete. Nearly two hundred years after Jefferson started on it, Monticello was finally the house he had intended it to be.

Had Thomas Jefferson and George Washington merely been plantation owners who built interesting houses, that would have been accomplishment enough, but in fact of course between them they also instituted a political revolution, conducted a long war, created and tirelessly served a new nation, and spent years away from home. Despite these distractions, and without proper training or materials, they managed to build two of the most satisfying houses ever built. That really is quite an achievement.

Monticello’s celebrated contraptions—its silent dumbwaiters, dual-action doors, and the like—are sometimes dismissed as gimmicks, but in fact they anticipated by 150 years or so the American love for labor-saving devices, and helped make Monticello not just the most stylish house ever built in America but also the first modern one. But it is Mount Vernon that has been the more influential of the two. It became the ideal from which countless other houses, as well as drive-through banks, motels, restaurants, and other roadside attractions, derive. Probably no other single building in America has been more widely copied—almost always, alas, with a certain robust kitschiness, but that is hardly Washington’s fault and decidedly unfair to his reputation. Not incidentally, Washington also introduced the first ha-ha into America and can reasonably claim to be the father of the American lawn; among all else he did, he devoted years of meticulous effort to trying to create the perfect bowling green, and in so doing became a leading authority in the New World on grass seed and grass.

It is remarkable to think that much less than a century separated Jefferson and Washington living in a wilderness without infrastructure from a Gilded Age America that dominated the world. At probably no time in history has daily life changed more radically and comprehensively than in the seventy-four years between the death of Thomas Jefferson in 1826 and the beginning of the following century—very nearly the same years, as it coincidentally happens, that marked the boundaries of our own Mr. Marsham’s quietly uneventful life in England.

There is a small postscript to all this. In the summer of 1814, the British burned down America’s Capitol