Fourteen years after it was sent to Monticello for a three-month study period, Mathews County’s Campeachy chair is still on loan to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

Mathews residents Steve Whiteway, Dennis Baker, Art Miller and Daniel Webster traveled to Charlottesville on July 23 as guests of the foundation to tour Monticello and to have a special viewing of the chair, which is at the historic site for the purpose of research.

Discovered with a broken arm on the dusty second floor of the historic courthouse in 1975, the Mathews County Campeachy chair sat virtually unnoticed until 1998, when curators from Monticello visited the county to examine it. At that time, Circuit Court clerk Eugene Callis gave the foundation’s representatives permission to take the chair for three months to determine if it were an authentic early-19th century Campeachy chair built by Monticello’s slave cabinetmakers.

Three years later, with the chair still at...