Archaeologists digging at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello have unearthed a previously unknown part of the Founding Father’s famous Virginia home — and that Jefferson left entirely out of his maps, drawings, notes, and letters.
A brick kiln was uncovered on the east side of the property during an excavation that began in March. Monticello officials believe it dates to the early 1770s, around the time of Jefferson’s drafting of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was part of the construction of Monticello I, the original version of the home. The structure visitors see today reflects a later rebuild and expansion completed after Jefferson returned from France in 1789.
Crystal O’Connor, manager of archaeological field research at Monticello, said the discovery caught her team off guard.
“Archaeologists immediately started hitting brick, and uncovered a series of low parallel brick walls, evenly spaced about a foot and a half apart, with channels running between them,” O’Connor told Fox News Digital. “While the team and I weren’t sure of what we were looking at initially, that pattern is a telltale sign of a brick kiln.”
The channels between the walls were filled with overcooked brick rubble, and the soil beneath had been baked hard by intense heat. Workers once stacked thousands of unfired bricks on top of the structure and kept fires burning for days until the bricks hardened enough to build with.
“When the firing was done, workers took the kiln apart and carried the finished bricks to the house,” O’Connor said. “This kiln was crucial to building the home of the author of the Declaration of Independence.”
“Jefferson knew about this work because he contracted with his brickmakers for a set number of bricks before each major building campaign,” O’Connor said. “He would not have overseen the firings himself.”
Records show Jefferson calculated in late 1774 whether it was more efficient to haul finished bricks uphill to the construction site or produce them on site closer to the raw materials.
“We wonder if the brickmakers themselves pointed out the problem of dragging barrels of water and loads of firewood uphill, and if that helped push Jefferson to do the math and move the work downhill,” O’Connor said.
Among the finds at the site were bricks stamped with initials and several shaped in custom molds — curved and S-shaped profiles used in the exterior brickwork of the dining room wall, which dates to around 1772. O’Connor said those decorative bricks appear nowhere else on the house.
“They don’t appear anywhere else on the house and represent a crazy amount of customization,” she said. “Finding them in the rubble next to the kiln is what tells us it dates to the early 1770s.”
The kiln appears in none of Jefferson’s known records — a detail that underscores the limits of even the most thoroughly documented historic sites.
“The discovery has already changed how we understand the building of Monticello,” O’Connor said. “Even at one of the best-documented historic sites in America, archaeology keeps revealing what the written record does not.”
A hidden brick kiln uncovered at #Monticello is revealing how #ThomasJefferson’s home was built in the early 1770s, with archaeologists saying the find was never recorded in his maps, drawings, notes, or letters: https://t.co/xiYuXm7PcB
— Erik Hoffmann (@TheErikHoffmann) April 13, 2026