Monday Answer.
Verne followed my thoughts. The person was Thomas Jefferson and the place is Monticello, and to a somewhat lesser extent Poplar Forest. Jefferson�s ideal to be independent required at least three master joiners brought in to the produce wooden parts for the house. It needed the relative closeness of Charlottesville and Williamsburg. It also required one hundred eighty seven slaves and a series of shops and offices along a lane called Mulberry Row adjacent to the gardens at Monticello. He had a nail shop, blacksmith, carpentry shop. In 1796, when Jefferson had temporarily retired from public office, there were seventeen structures along the 1,000-foot-long Row. These included dwellings for black and white workers, a smokehouse and dairy, a wash house, storehouses, and a stable. He was 30 years in and still wasn�t finished. My point for the trivia that his version of �independence� required a lot of help and today as well as then would bankrupt most people. In 1830 the estate was $100,000 dollars in debt. Five years after Jefferson�s death in 1831 a parcel with the house of 552 acres was sold for $7,500. In 1836 it was about ready to be divided when another bought the property.
As to the savior of Monticello. That man was a Navy Commodore, equivalent today to a one star Admiral, Uriah Levy. Levy was pompous, vain, prickly, and opinioned. He had lived through five duels but admired Jefferson however. He lived in New York because of his work but Levy and family held the land much longer than did the Jefferson and Randolph families until 1923 when it was sold to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. (They did lose the land during the Civil War, but got it back after the war.) Because Levy was Jewish, and it was the south, and at one point threatened to turn the acreage into a Jewish home for boys, he and his family's stewardship was left out of much of the history of Monticello until the 1980s. Although the Levy�s cannot be a part of the Jefferson burials still (along with any Hemmings relatives), at least one Levy is buried on Montecello land. Check out William Adams �Jefferson�s Monticello� and Marc Leepson �Saving Monticello�