Jefferson labeled this building as "m. house 43 ½ f. by 16. f. of wood, the floors of earth, used as smokehouse for meat, and a dairy" in the 1796 Mutual Assurance Plat.
Smokehouse/Dairy Gallery
Digital model of smokehouse/dairy. Image by RenderSphere, LLC
Animated reconstruction of the Smokehouse/Dairy showing the two smoking rooms separated by a central dairy space
Overhead view of the 1981 excavation of the smokehouse/dairy site (left) and brick-paved building l, the storehouse for iron (right).
Example of meat hanging in a second and later smokehouse in Mounticello's South Wing.
This three-celled was used as a smokehouse for meat and a dairy between 1790 and 1808. Jefferson combined two of what he considered “indispensable” elements of a Virginia plantation under one roof, “two meat-houses” and a “passage between” for a dairy. Enslaved men and women cut, salted, and cured beef and pork in the smokehouses; the women made cream and butter in the dairy. Jefferson’s daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph, like other plantation mistresses in Virginia, often supervised these activities. In 1809, the smokehouse and dairy functions moved to the South Wing of the main house.