The estate, reduced by land sales from about 5,000 acres to 522, sold in August 1831 for $7,000 to James Turner Barclay, an eccentric local druggist whom Martha Jefferson Randolph considered to be a madman. He grew experimental silkworms on the property before becoming a missionary and decamping for the Holy Land.

In 1834, Barclay sold Monticello to Uriah Phillips Levy, who braved anti-Semitism in the United States Navy to become the first Jewish commodore, and also helped persuade Congress to end the naval practice of flogging. Levy admired Jefferson as “an absolute democrat” who had helped to mold a republic in which “a man’s religion does not make him ineligible for political or government life.” He was imprisoned after his United States brig was captured by the British during the War of 1812, and he amassed a fortune in New York real estate.

When Levy died in 1862, he willed Monticello to the federal government as a school for Navy orphans, but in the heat of the Civil War, Jefferson Davis’s Confederacy seized and used it as a convalescent home for wounded rebel soldiers. Thanks to souvenir-seekers and vandals, the estate soon became, as one visitor recalled, “an absolute ruin,” with caretakers herding cattle during the winter into Jefferson’s old basement.

The commodore’s nephew, Jefferson Monroe Levy, bought out his feuding relatives in 1879 for $10,050 (about $239,000 now), vowing to restore Monticello “to the original plans and style.” Within a decade, a visiting reporter found it “as sound and substantial a country mansion as it ever was.” In 1897, William Jennings Bryan, just after his first defeat for president by William McKinley, wrote Levy a public letter proposing that Monticello be purchased by the federal government. Levy replied that no amount of money could induce him to sell.

In 1912, while leading a national drive for public ownership of Monticello using petitions and mass mailings, Maud Wilson Littleton, the Texas-born wife of a Democratic congressman from Brooklyn, published a needling account of having dined at Monticello. She wrote: “One could hear and see only the Levys and the Levy family, their deeds of valor, their accomplishments, their lives. I wished I could get them out of my mind, but when I left Monticello, Thomas Jefferson was but a disappearing memory, run out into and mixed up with the Levys.”