August 31: Secrets of Monticello's West Lawn

By Fraser Neiman

August 31, 2026

In August, Monticello's field archaeologists, under the leadership of Field Research Manager Crystal O'Connor, completed our exploration of an area on the north slope leading up to the West Lawn (Figure 1). As our excavation quadrats approached the north edge of the lawn, we had to dig deeper and deeper to reach the original ground surface. Eventually we discovered it lay under more than five feet of human-deposited fill. That fill shows that the flat surface today's visitors cross to catch the "Nickel View" of Jefferson's house is a giant artifact. It is the physical trace of Jefferson's design, his determination to modify the mountain's natural topography to realize it, and the undocumented labor of the enslaved workers required to create the surface we see today.

Previous students of garden history have taken the West Lawn topography for granted, focusing instead on the features Jefferson designed to adorn the flat surface: the winding circumferential walk and the garden beds that bordered it (Figure 2). Both were documented in Jefferson's writings and restored by the Garden Club of Virginia in 1940.

Researchers acknowledged that the West Lawn surface was unnatural. However, they were incurious about when or how it was created, perhaps assuming the landscape modification involved was modest. The silence of the copious documentary record left by Jefferson on the topic may have encouraged that assumption and its persistence. It was the view we brought with us at the start of our excavation project, which is why the deep fill was a revelation.

Archaeologists prefer revelations that are credible because they are backed by evidence. A key source of evidence is the stratification visible in the eastern side wall of one of our excavation quadrats, 15 feet north of the winding walk. Understanding it requires a bit of background (Figure 3).

What scientists call "soil profiles" form on a stable surface over centuries and millennia, as weathering and other processes act on the ground. These processes produce a series of zones, called "horizons": a dark, organic topsoil (the A horizon) at the top, a clay-rich subsoil (the B horizon) below it, and weathered rock (the C horizon) below that. When sediments from those horizons show up in our quadrat side walls out of order, or mixed together, it means someone dug into an intact soil profile at another location and moved the sediment here. That's what the side wall of one of our quads shows.

When this photo was taken, we had already removed about a foot of dirt from the quad in the background to comply with OSHA safety guidelines, exposing the surface on which the five-foot black, white, and red photo scale sits. So the top layers of the side wall are missing. They consisted of an incipient topsoil, or A-horizon layer, that had developed over the past couple of centuries on the surface of a stable fill deposit. That recent topsoil graded into a zone of more clay-rich fill unaffected by soil-formation processes—the layer on which the scale bar sits.

This layer (labeled "1" in Figure 3) is a mixture of sediments derived from both the organic A horizon and the clay-rich B horizon, dug from an undisturbed soil profile elsewhere on the mountaintop and deposited here. The layer continues down the side wall, reaching about three feet below the scale bar on the left but only one foot below it on the right, next to Crystal's shoulder.

This layer sits on the sloping surface of a very different deposit (2), full of gravel and sand-size bits of decomposing greenstone—the local bedrock—that betray its origins deeper in the soil profile, in the B and/or C horizons. Below that is another clay-rich zone of mixed A- and B-horizon sediment (3). Finally, we arrive at the original mountaintop ground surface, marked by a nearly horizontal layer of charcoal-flecked, organic-rich soil. This is the original A horizon, grading into the B horizon on which Crystal is standing. The total depth from the modern ground surface, with its incipient A horizon, to the top of the original ground surface is five feet.

When were these fill layers deposited? A precise answer awaits washing and cataloging the artifacts we recovered, then analyzing the frequencies of chronologically sensitive artifact types in successive layers. Our preliminary assessment, however, is that deposition occurred in the first decade of the 19th century. If that's right, then construction of the West Lawn was integrated with the larger architectural campaign that gave us Monticello II, the second iteration of Jefferson's mansion.

Where did the sediment in these fill layers come from? There are several candidate sources. Among them are the cuts into the mountain's north and south slopes required to build the South and North Wings of Monticello II. Another possibility is the excavation of new cellars under the house when Jefferson doubled its size. And some of the fill almost certainly came from slicing away portions of the original mountaintop surface that rose above the level of the West Lawn Jefferson had designed. There is some evidence that this was the source of at least the lower layers of fill (2, 3): their surfaces slope down to the north, an indication that they were deposited by dumping fill from a higher surface to the south, where the West Lawn lies.

Important questions remain unanswered. Among them is how much of the rest of the West Lawn surface is underlain by fill and how much by portions of the original B or C horizons truncated to the level we see today. Answering that would require more evidence from test excavations scattered across the West Lawn. That evidence would allow us to estimate more accurately how much dirt had to be moved to create it. But even our limited excavations, undertaken in advance of construction of a path to improve accessibility, have shown that the labor required was far greater than we or our predecessors had suspected.