FEUDING FOUNDERS COLLECTIVE | Jay Heritage Center - The Untold Drama of Silas Deane, John Jay, and the Lees of Virginia

Tickets on sale March 2026. Register your interest with an email to Renee Dumouchel: This event takes place at Jay Heritage Center in Rye, NY. Attend the full day in person, or purchase a virtual ticket for the roundtable discussion. We tend to remember the founders as marble men — monumental, unified, certain. The truth is messier and more interesting. The Feuding Founders Collective is a multi-site public history initiative that humanizes Silas Deane, John Jay, and the Lee brothers of Virginia — men who were in conversation, in collaboration, and sometimes in conflict with one another. Presented in partnership with Jay Heritage Center (NY), Friends of John Jay Homestead, and Menokin and Stratford Hall (VA), this series destabilizes the one-dimensional portraits we’ve inherited and invites audiences to sit with the full complexity of these lives: the ambition and the insecurity, the idealism and the grudges, the smear campaigns and the shared cause. In an era of weaponized media and public takedowns, these 250-year-old stories feel less like history and more like a mirror — and understanding how the founders navigated political polarization, character assassination, and the tension between principle and self-interest may be one of the most useful things the past can offer us right now. Three sites. Three perspectives.