Thomas Jefferson Grotjan (1823–91), merchant and auctioneer, was a native of Philadelphia. By 1844 he lived in Logan, Kentucky. Grotjan worked as a merchant in Philadelphia by 1850. He lived in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1860 and 1870, where he was listed as an auctioneer and liquor importer. Grotjan settled in Baltimore by 1880 and formed an auctioneering and mercantile firm under the name of Grotjan Mitchell & Company. He died in Baltimore and was buried in Green Mount Cemetery there (Madison Co., Ky., Marriage Records, 31 Dec. 1844; DNA: RG 29, CS, Pa., Philadelphia, 1850, Ky., Louisville, 1860, Md., Baltimore, 1880; Laws of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania passed at the Session of 1851 [1851], 268; Edwards’ Annual Directory … in the City of Louisville 6 [1870]: 153; Woods’s Baltimore City Directory [1881], 351; Baltimore Sun, 14 Feb. 1891).

Benjamin O. Tyler, an engraver and penmanship instructor who in 1818 produced an engraving of the Declaration of Independence and visited Monticello, prepared in around 1833 a one-page facsimile consisting of the above letter and one from President Andrew Jackson to Grotjan of 9 June 1833, hoping to use this sheet to obtain support for two larger works containing as many as “seventeen original and appropriate letters,” accompanied by portraits of all the presidents and other worthies, which would become “the most SPLENDID NATIONAL PRINT ever published in this or any other country” (Tyler, A Circular addressed to the Governor & Council and Members of the Legislature of Vermont [1833], quotes on p. 5). Neither of these more ambitious efforts seem to have come to fruition. Copies of the broadside with the TJ and Jackson letters are in MH and ViU.