A Trinidad native ‘saved Jefferson’ and took these amazing photos of the region

The famous preservationist had roots in Southern Colorado, which echoes through his surveying photos from the 1930s.

The first line of the New York Times’ 1995 obituary of Frederick D. Nichols reads that the man who saved Thomas Jefferson from Stanford White had died.

Nichols, a Trinidad, Colorado, native, didn’t actually save Jefferson. Rather, Nichols saved Jefferson’s Rotunda from “the flamboyant New York architect” who was later murdered by millionaire Harry Kendall Thaw — his wife was having an affair with White.

A fire in 1895 left the Rotunda in ruins and White, a nationally-known architect from New York City, rebuilt the Rotunda. His main gig was designing homes for the rich and famous. White’s modernist style wasn’t quite what Jefferson had envisioned, but it remained for several years until Nichols returned the Rotunda to its glory in the 1970s at a cost of $2.4 million.

The New York Times reported in Nichols’ obituary that he first became interested in Jefferson while working on sketches on Virginia plantations as part of a survey project for the Parks Service.

He later went on to restore Popular Forest, Jefferson’s summer house near Lynchburg he helped open Montpelier, the house Jefferson designed for James Madison, to the public.