Enslaved and Free Workers Built Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello Brick by Brick. Archaeologists Just Discovered One of the Kilns They Used

Researchers think the newly unearthed structure was used to fire and cure bricks during construction of the site’s original mansion in the early 1770s

Sarah Kuta | Daily Correspondent

April 13, 2026

Share

Copy linkEmailSMSFacebookXRedditLinkedInBlueskyPrint

Add as preferred source

Archaeologists have been studying Monticello, the 18th-century plantation and home of Thomas Jefferson, for decades. Yet they’re still making new discoveries.

Most recently, researchers unearthed the remains of a kiln buried under the property’s East Lawn. They believe the structure was used to fire and cure bricks that were used in the construction of the site’s original mansion, Monticello I, in the early 1770s.

Crystal O’Connor, Monticello’s archaeological field research manager, and Fraser Neiman, director of archaeology, announced the discovery on March 30.

Jefferson, a founding father who served as the nation’s third president, inherited the mountaintop plot in Virginia from his father in 1764. By the late 1760s, Jefferson had started making plans to build a house at Monticello, which means “little mountain” in Italian. Workers built the two-story, three-room home, now known as Monticello I, throughout the 1770s. It was largely completed by 1781.

Not long after that, Jefferson began spending long periods away from Monticello—first as minister to France and then as George Washington’s secretary of state. In the mid-1790s, Jefferson renovated and greatly expanded the home, which became known as Monticello II and still stands today.

Monticello is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a popular tourist attraction, welcoming roughly 500,000 visitors each year. Archaeologists, including students from the University of Virginia, also continue to investigate the site, which researchers have described as an “archaeological sandbox.”

“No other site has Jefferson, and to be able to study his architecture and the buildings that he had constructed is fascinating,” O’Connor told C-Ville Weekly in May 2024.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Monticello (@tjmonticello)

Researchers discovered the kiln while digging test plots to ensure that planned construction of a new shuttle stop for visitors wouldn’t destroy any Jefferson-era archaeological deposits. Their initial excavations last month revealed a layer of brick rubble, then two short segments of bricks that appeared to have been deliberately arranged. As they continued their work, they found even more brick segments.

The segments, which are all two bricks wide, run parallel to each other. They’re separated by a 1.5-foot channel filled with overfired brick rubble. When archaeologists removed the rubble from the channels, they discovered a layer of topsoil that had been burned “brick hard,” according to the museum’s announcement.

The evidence suggests that the remains came from a brick kiln. More than two centuries ago, the brick segments formed the walls of “fire channels” that workers filled with wood. Afterward, they carefully piled unfired bricks atop the entire structure and set the wood on fire. Over the course of several days, the intense heat of the kiln hardened the unfired bricks.

The kiln may have been used by brickmakers George Dudley or William Bishop, free workmen employed on the plantation. Or, it might have been used by some of the more than 600 people enslaved by Jefferson, the archaeologists speculate.

Dating the kiln was a bit of a challenge, since archaeologists didn’t find any other artifacts nearby. But their excavations did produce a helpful clue: specially shaped bricks that had been molded into neoclassical shapes. Since archaeologists know that Jefferson only used the specialty bricks while building Monticello I, they can confidently date the kiln to that period.

Jefferson was well known for his interest in neoclassical design. As Erik Neil, director of the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, told CBS News in 2020, Jefferson was “one of the most advanced architectural thinkers of his time.”

Archaeologists have discovered brick kilns elsewhere on the property, downhill from the house in a valley with a stream. They suspect Jefferson eventually relocated the kilns so they would be closer to the raw materials, like water and wood, needed to make bricks.

Moving forward, researchers are continuing their work at Monticello. In recent months, they’ve been investigating Jefferson’s “privy tunnel,” which ventilated three indoor privies Jefferson installed in Monticello II. They’ve also been studying pottery fragments with a distinctive beaded decoration, analyzing layers of sediment beneath the homes of enslaved individuals, and investigating stones they believe were ingested by birds and other animals to help with digestion.

“It helps us … remember that we’re not done learning about the past and reinterpreting the past and understanding it,” O’Connor tells WWBT’s Joel Vazquez-Juarbe. “There’s stories that are still out there waiting to be told.”

Some of the stories that archaeology projects help to uncover center on the enslaved people who lived at Monticello. For example, in 2017, researchers excavated and restored a room that Sally Hemings may have used in order to reinterpret it for visitors, Krissah Thompson reported for the Washington Post. Historians believe the enslaved woman gave birth to six of Jefferson’s children.

One of the biggest projects that scholars at Monticello are undertaking is the plantation survey, an ongoing effort to locate every archaeological site on the Thomas Jefferson Foundation-owned property, which is about half of Jefferson’s original 5,000 acres.

By surveying the entire landscape, they hope to create a “cumulative record of land use history that in many ways is more complete than the documentary record left us by Thomas Jefferson,” the archaeologists write. The brick kiln, which was never recorded in historic documentation, illustrates the value of this approach.

Editors’ note, April 13, 2026: This article has been updated to correct Dudley's status at Monticello.

Sarah Kuta | Read More

Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.