RC (DLC); at foot of text: “Thomas Jefferson Esqr. Vice President of the United States”; endorsed by TJ as received 30 Dec. and so recorded in SJL.

A native of North Carolina, Morgan Brown (1758–1840) moved his family to Tennessee in 1795 and settled on the Cumberland River, where he laid out the town of Palmyra. In 1797 the town became a port of entry and Brown was appointed U.S. collector for the District of Tennessee and inspector of the revenue at Palmyra. Later Brown, who was a doctor and sold medicines, also kept a store, built a mill, established an iron-smelting furnace, and presided over a county court. He moved to Kentucky in 1808, later returning to Tennessee (American Historical Magazine and Tennessee Historical Society Quarterly, 7 [1902], 98–9, 148; JEP, description begins Journal of the Executive Proceedings of the Senate of the United States … to the Termination of the Nineteenth Congress, Washington, D.C., 1828, 3 vols. description ends 1:226–7).

A work on Tennessee’s antiquities first published in 1823 stated that the two statues described above by Brown were “found by ploughing the ground near a very large mound below Clarksville‥‥ One represented an old man with his body bent forward, and head inclined downwards, exceedingly well executed. The other represented an old woman.” Brown shipped the stones downriver and they went around the coast by sea from New Orleans in 1801. When they were on display among other art and artifacts in the Entrance Hall at Monticello, TJ described the sculptures as “two busts of Indian figures male & female, by Indians, in hard stone. 18. I. high,” mistaking their origins somewhat by cataloging them as “dug up at a place called Palmyra, on the Tennissee.” An 1807 notice in an English magazine, which also called the site of the discovery “Palmyra, on the river Tennessee,” described the carvings: “The human form extends to the middle of the body, and the figures are nearly of the natural size. The lineaments are strongly marked, and such as are peculiar to the copper-coloured aboriginal inhabitants of America: among others, is one of them representing an aged savage, in which the wrinkles and look are very expressive.” The magazine praised the statues’ creators for “executing such a good resemblance of the human head, face, neck, and shoulders.” It is not known what became of the two sculptures after TJ’s death (John Haywood, Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee, ed. Mary U. Rothrock [Jackson, Tenn., 1959], 141; The Monthly Magazine, 24 [1807], 74; Susan R. Stein, The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello [New York, 1993], 410, 458n; Catalogue of Paintings, undated MS in ViU: McGregor Library; MB, description begins James A. Bear, Jr., and Lucia C. Stanton, eds., Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826, Princeton, 1997, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Second Series description ends 2:1058).