March 30, 2026: Discovery of East Lawn Brick Kiln

By Crystal O'Connor and Fraser Neiman

March 30, 2026

The archaeology team has uncovered a brick kiln on Monticello's East Lawn, at the intersection of the East Walk with the paved shuttle road. This is an exciting development and a reminder that we are still actively learning about Monticello, its built environment, and the people who lived and labored here.

From Brick Scatter to Brick Kiln

In 2018, archaeologists working on the Plantation Archaeological Survey, our ongoing effort to find every site on Thomas Jefferson Foundation property, recorded a large scatter of brick fragments in shovel test pits excavated just north of the East Walk. Earlier this month, we excavated larger test units in this area to ensure that a planned upgrade to the bus boarding area would not destroy Jefferson-era archaeological deposits. In our first few quadrats, we uncovered a continuous layer of brick rubble. As we began to remove the rubble, we found two short segments of brick in course. Each segment consisted of two rows of bricks, laid on their sides in "rowlock" courses. 

Initially, we thought this might be the remains of piles into which workers stacked bricks after carting them up from the base of Monticello Mountain, where they were manufactured. We abandoned that hypothesis as we expanded excavations and found three more segments paralleling each other, each two bricks wide and separated from its neighbor by a 1.5-foot channel filled with overfired brick rubble. We removed the rubble from the channels and found a buried topsoil surface that had been burned brick hard.

We had uncovered the remains of a brick kiln (Figure 1). The brick segments were the walls of fire channels that ran under a mass of unfired bricks carefully stacked over them. Brickmakers loaded the channels with wood to fuel the intense fires needed to cure, or harden, the bricks above.

The firing process took several days. When complete, the superstructure was disassembled, and the finished bricks were carried to the house for use in its construction. The brick scatter we recorded in 2018, which partially covered the kiln walls and filled the channels, is likely debris from that process. Jefferson noted that roughly one-fifth of bricks from each firing came out unusable (Bear and Stanton 1997:367).

Dating the Kiln

With almost no artifacts besides brick to help us date the structure, the question of when this kiln was in use was a challenging one. Fortunately, we recovered several bricks shaped in special molds to conform to neoclassical design conventions (Figures 2-6). The surfaces of three bricks have a "cyma" profile, making them S-shaped in cross section. Another has a convex quarter-round, or "ovolo," molding. These "specialty bricks" are unique to the first version of the mansion, Monticello I.

Jefferson used both moldings in the exterior brickwork of the dining room wall on the West Lawn side, which dates to around 1772 (Mesick Cohen Waite Architects 1993a:21). Jefferson's design featured an ovolo on top of a cyma to form a water table where the foundation wall emerges from the ground today (Figure 7). The ground surface was lower in the Monticello I period and this molding would have been much more visible. There is a second water table or string course a few feet above, comprised of a concave quarter-round, or "cavetto", topped by an ovolo and then an ordinary brick protruding over it.

Prominent water tables made with specialty bricks were a fashionable feature of elite architecture across the British Atlantic world during much of the eighteenth century. Prominent Chesapeake examples include Stratford Hall (c. 1740), Carter's Grove (c. 1750) in Virginia, and the Brice House (c. 1770) in Annapolis, Maryland. However, these examples all have a single water table. Jefferson's design for Monticello I featured two. A look at Jefferson's careful elevation drawing for Monticello I shows why (Figure 8). They matched the moldings at the base and top of the plinths on which the columns supporting the double portico would sit.

Our current hypothesis is that the two water tables represent Jefferson's decision to apply the neoclassical prescriptions for the design of plinths to the entire façade. By the time Jefferson began building Monticello II in the late 1790s, water tables were no longer fashionable, and Jefferson dropped them from his design.

The presence of these specialty bricks in the rubble layer overlying the kiln tells us that it dates to the Monticello I period, likely the early 1770s. It may have been the kiln of George Dudley or William Bishop, who were hired to make bricks for the South Pavilion and the dining room (Bear and Stanton 1997:145 n8). Enslaved laborers certainly worked here as well (Bear and Stanton 1997:458).

Why Did the Kiln Move?

Thanks to the Plantation Archaeological Survey, we know that brick kilns were later located downhill, in a valley that contains a stream near the present-day intersection of the exit road from the Visitor's Center with Route 53. Why the change in location?

In December 1774, Jefferson did a bit of algebra to determine "whether better to waggon bricks, or the water & wood that makes them". He estimated that every 1,000 bricks needed three hogsheads of water and 96 cubic feet of wood.  Taking into account the  fact that 20% of the brick form each firing would be unusable, Jeferson's arithmetic implies that "waggoning bricks" required moving about two thirds the weight of the alterative (Bear and Stanton 1997:367).  We can't help but wonder if the brickmakers themselves recognized the inefficiency of hauling hogsheads of water and cords of wood uphill to this spot on the East Lawn, and whether that practical reality helped motivate Jefferson's computation and the decision to relocate kiln operations downslope, closer to the raw materials.

A Final Puzzle

During our excavations last year along the south edge of the East Lawn, in advance of the construction of new accessible pathways on the Mountaintop, we recovered masses of brick rubble from fill layers that were excavated and deposited to create the topography we see today. These efforts, synchronized with the construction of Monticello II, took place in the 1790s. Initially, we thought the rubble might be debris from the demolition of Monticello I. The problem with this idea is that the rubble lacked the mortar we would expect had the bricks been used in construction. A second hypothesis was that the rubble was from unmortared nogging used to insulate floors. However, there was far too much of it. Our brick kiln discovery solves the puzzle: the rubble is evidence that burning brick in kilns on the mountaintop was an integral part of the construction process for Monticello I.

References

Bear, James A. and Lucia C. Stanton. 1997. Jefferson's Memorandum Books. Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767-1826. 2 Vols. Princeton University Press, New Jersey. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/02-01-02-0008

Mesick Cohen Waite Architects. 1993. Monticello Historic Structure Report, Mesick Cohen Waite Architects, Albany, N.Y.