South Pavilion Kitchen Stew Stove

An archaeologist uncovers a section of the base for a brick stew stove in Monticello’s South Pavilion kitchen, the first functioning kitchen at Thomas Jefferson’s mountaintop mansion. Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson would work in this kitchen with Ursula Granger, an enslaved woman Martha Jefferson asked her husband to purchase in 1773. According to Granger’s son, Isaac Jefferson, Martha Jefferson would “come out there with a cookery book in her hand & read out of it” to Ursula Granger while preparing certain meals.