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Fascinating and Lesser Known People Who Changed American History

Khalid Elhassan May 5, 2020 33 min

Normandy landings - Operation Overlord — Men of the 320th in Normandy. YouTube

33. Restoring Monticello

Today, Monticello is a pristine mansion, carefully restored to its caretakers’ best conception of Thomas Jefferson’s original plan. It is difficult to imagine that lovingly cared for plantation as having once been a seedy and rundown mess. Yet a seedy and rundown mess was what Uriah Levy bought when he purchased Monticello in 1834. He set about its restoration with a will.

Levy gathered a small army of workers, including a dozen slaves whom he purchased, to clean out the house’s interior, repair its exterior, and restore the surrounding lawns and gardens. He went to great lengths to restore Monticello to its former glory, including chasing down furniture that had been auctioned off after Jefferson’s death. Because of his naval career and business in NYC, Levy lived only sporadically in Monticello. When he died in 1862, he left Monticello to the US government, plus income from his estate, valued at the then-princely sum of $300,000, to support an agricultural farm at Monticello for the orphaned sons of sailors and others.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.