University of Virginia Library

Building Stops

The visitors' decision to continue delaying the start of the library coupled with the end of the
building season all but extinguished construction at the site for the foreseeable future.[515]
Jefferson realized toward the end of January 1822 that the university's undertakers might
flee the site for new horizons if the remainder of the $60,000 loan was not dispersed soon by
the Literary Fund.[516] (In fact brickworker Dabney Cosby of Staunton did just that,
returning to the Shenandoah Valley to work.)[517] It was not till the last day of the month of
January that Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., sent him word that the board of directors of the
Literary Fund finally had met and approved the additional sum.[518] Jefferson's instruction to
the proctor upon executing the bond was to "authorise any draught within that amount that
the bursar chuses: and my opinion would be to draw for and pay every settled debt we owe
in the world at once. our affairs would then stand on simpler ground." Unable to travel to the
university with visiting artist William John Coffee because of the "weather & roads,"
Jefferson also hinted that some of the new funds could be applied to making "cornices in all
the rooms of the Western hotels. if Architraves & frizes would cost more than plaister, these
may be omitted." Coffee, he added, could "do the ornaments of the frizes in some of the best
rooms."[519]