Thomas Jefferson regularly sought to persuade artisans and tradesmen in a wide variety of fields to move to Charlottesville, assuring them in glowing terms of its advantageous location and bright future. Late in 1816 he thought that his efforts to attract a watchmaker to the town were on the verge of success. Jefferson had asked his old friend Charles Willson Peale, the artist, inventor, and Philadelphia museum proprietor, to recruit someone in this craft to come to Virginia. At Peale's behest Joseph E. McIlhenney, a clock- and watchmaker, contacted Jefferson and duly came to town. As recounted below, a delighted Jefferson invited him to Monticello, found him a suitable shop to rent, guaranteed his room and board for the first year, recommended him to potential customers, and asked him to return to Monticello promptly to work on several repair projects. Scared off by a potential rival, McIlhenney instead stunned Jefferson by taking the first coach headed north and failing to return. He prospered in Philadelphia as a clockmaker and dentist, leaving Charlottesville to the mercies of a watchmaker whom Jefferson roundly condemned as a "bungler." Fortunately, Jefferson's next attempt to obtain a suitable artisan to repair his and the town's timepieces ended happily a few months later with the arrival of Louis A. Leschot, a Swiss craftsman who sold Jefferson some watches and repaired others. Leschot became an American citizen and was buried at Monticello more than a decade after Jefferson's death.
PoC (MHi); on reused address cover of Elizabeth Ticknor to TJ, 10 Sept. 1816; mutilated at seal, with one word rewritten by TJ; edge trimmed; at foot of first page: “Mr Peale”; endorsed by TJ.
Posted October 2015. Reprinted from The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, 10:606–7.