Monticello Knits Jefferson Kin : Descendants Lovingly Maintain Former President’s Home

Among the more than 500,000 visitors each year to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s 21-room mansion high on a mountaintop in Virginia’s Albemarle County, are many of the third President’s direct descendants.

Jefferson had six children but only two survived to adulthood: daughters Martha, who had 11 children, and Mary, who had one son. Today their descendants number more than 1,200 and are scattered throughout America from Maine to California.

“We believe Thomas Jefferson has more lineal descendants than any other President,” noted George Green Shackelford, a Virginia Polytechnic Institute history professor and a former president of the Monticello Assn.

To be a member of the Monticello Assn., one has to be able to trace his or her ancestry direct to Thomas Jefferson. There are more than 900 dues-paying members of this unusual group, from small children to men and women in their 80s and 90s.

“My father was the founder of the Monticello Assn. in 1913 and served as its first treasurer,” Shackelford explained. “Its purposes then and now are to protect and preserve the family graveyard at Monticello, to protect and perpetuate the reputation and fame of Thomas Jefferson and to encourage friendship and association among his descendants.”

Jefferson spent 40 years designing and supervising the construction, additions to and remodeling of Monticello, familiar to all Americans as the majestic Colonial home that’s depicted on the back of the nickel. The President’s portrait, of course, is on the other side of the coin.

Architectural Masterpiece

Monticello is one of the nation’s all-time architectural masterpieces with its dome, patterned after that of the ancient temple of Vesta at Rome, the first dome ever built on an American home.

Jefferson spent a fortune on Monticello. As for the years and money he invested in his dream house and the works of art and expensive furnishings he had within it, he said:

“Architecture is my delight, and putting up and pulling down, one of my favorite amusements.”

Architect was his avocation, and the house was his creation. There wasn’t another like it in the young nation. The word monticello is Italian for “little mountain.” It describes the 867-foot-high peak that commands a spectacular view of the rolling Virginia countryside that Jefferson so dearly loved.

But the estate taxed his resources. In the last years of his life, he owed more than $100,000. He staged his own lottery, hoping that it would save the house and bring in enough money to pay off his creditors. But that did not work.

Forced to Sell Estate

He died broke in his 83rd year on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. His family was forced to sell Monticello a year after his death to pay off his bills.

Fortunately, U.S. Navy Commodore Uriah Phillips Levy, an ardent admirer of Jefferson’s, purchased Monticello in 1836. When Levy died in 1862 (during the Civil War), the Confederate government seized the property. It had been in litigation for 17 years when Levy’s nephew, Jefferson Monroe Levy, regained possession.

The Levy family owned Monticello until 1923, when it was purchased for $500,000 by the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation to preserve and maintain it as a national shrine to the third President, who was the author of the Declaration of Independence and founder, first rector and architect of the original campus of the University of Virginia.

It was on April 13, 1923, Thomas Jefferson’s 180th birthday, that the foundation named in his honor purchased the property and set about to furnish Monticello with as many items as possible that originally belonged to the President and were in his home.

The 10-member Board of Trustees of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation is headed today by English professor Edgar Shannon, a former president of the University of Virginia. Monticello--consisting of 1,800 acres, including the 21-room home, the remains of plantation buildings, and the restoration of gardens as they were planted by Jefferson--is supported solely by revenues from admissions and profits from a gift shop.

“Ninety percent of everything in the house--the furniture, kitchen ware, paintings and works of art--belonged to Jefferson. It seems fairly complete, but in fact, we have only about 30% of what was there originally,” curator Susan Stein explains. “It is the largest collection of Jefferson’s possessions in any one place.”

She noted that although the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation has no formal link with the Monticello Assn., “we enjoy a close working relationship with Jefferson’s family. Many, many things you see in the house were donated, purchased or are on loan from Jefferson’s descendants.”

A Virtual Museum

The main entrance to the house is a large square room Jefferson called the Infants Hall. It was a virtual museum housing his natural history specimens, Indian artifacts and busts of Voltaire, Hamilton and himself, which are still there.

Hanging on a wall in the room are antlers of an elk and a moose (presented to him by Lewis and Clark after their historic expedition) and a buffalo head.

“The four main rooms in the house had 120 works of art, paintings, sculptures and engravings. We have 33 of those in the rooms where they were when Jefferson lived here,” Stein said.

Judge Scott Snowden of the Napa County Superior Court and his brother, Randolph F. Snowden, who lives in Napa and is chief executive of Thunder Road, a Bay Area teen-age drug and alcohol hospital, are descendants of Jefferson.

“He was my grandfather’s great-great grandfather,” said Randolph Snowden, who told of visiting Monticello a dozen times in his life, the first time at the age of 7, when he and his brother were taken there by their mother.

Bill Shackelford, a student at the University of Virginia’s School of Law, lives across the street from Monticello. “Everyday I drive up my driveway and see the same view of Monticello that you see on the back of a nickel,” said Shackelford, who is especially proud that he goes to the school founded by his great-great-great-great-great grandfather.

Jefferson’s descendants include attorneys (the current president of the Monticello Assn. is John Works, a New York City lawyer), a professional photographer, an owner of a yacht manufacturing company, businessmen and businesswomen, a Philadelphia radio station disc jockey, a banker, two successful authors and men and women from nearly all walks of life.

Thomas Randolph Ruffin, a Fort Walton Beach, Fla., police captain, was president of the Monticello Assn. in 1985-86. Ruffin’s Aunt Sally donated a table and a pair of stockings that had belonged to Jefferson to Monticello. He and his wife have made provisions in their will to be buried in the graveyard at Monticello.

‘Something You Live With’

“My two daughters in history classes have mentioned they are direct descendants of Thomas Jefferson, and other kids in the classes look at them and say things like: ‘Yeah, sure, I’m a descendant of George Washington.’ Same thing has happened to me all my life. It’s something you live with,” Ruffin said.

In the one-acre Monticello cemetery, which Jefferson set aside on the estate, is a six-foot obelisk he selected for his burial site. It’s inscribed at his direction with his own words and “not a word more”:

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson

Author of the Declaration of American Independence

Of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom

And father of the University of Virginia.

He did not mention serving as President of the United States in his instructions and that fact does not appear on his tomb.

George Green Shackelford, the history professor, also plans to be buried in the graveyard, which still has ample room for many more descendants.

Every year at the descendant’s annual three-day meeting in June at Monticello, the president of the Monticello Assn. leads the family in prayer, and small children who are Jefferson’s descendants place flowers on the President’s grave.

The annual meeting is a time to renew acquaintances, one of the stated purposes of the Monticello Assn. Jefferson’s descendants always enjoy a Colonial dinner as one of the highlights of the get-together and have a private tour of the mansion, including the dome and other rooms not open to the public.

An annual report is sent to all members reporting births, marriages and deaths among descendants. History professor Shackelford edited two volumes of the Collected Papers of the Monticello Assn., which were published in 1963 and 1984.

“The two volumes are the bible of the organization, filled with genealogical records and biographical sketches of many of the descendants,” Shackelford said.