UVA officials said that the lab featured its own heat source and ventilation system and “a specially designed hearth created to be used with a nearby chemistry classroom, when the university was first built in the 1820s”, according to an October 16 report from ABC News. The workstations and fireboxes within the building were fed by air that flowed from brick tunnels constructed beneath the building; and ducts carried fumes and smoke away from the chemical lab.
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Architects based at the university believe the hearth was part of the original science laboratories set up by John Emmet, the university’s first professor of natural history, in the 1820s.
In Jefferson’s original Rotunda, chemistry was taught in the Rotunda’s bottom floor.
Two brick niches were uncovered during renovations in the 1970s, but researchers didn’t realized there was more to the work space. The hearth survived an 1895 fire that destroyed much of the building’s interior. “We therefore prepare the rooms under the oval rooms of the ground floor of the rotunda for furnaces, stoves etc. These rooms are of 1,000 square feet area each”.
The Rotunda’s renovation is expected to be completed in 2016. The room was simply too small to properly dissipate the heat generated by the chemistry experiments, so Jefferson agreed to allow the professor to expand into the larger rooms of the Rotunda.
Mark Kutney, an architectural conservator in the University Architects Office said, “This may be the oldest intact example of early chemical education in this country”, Hogg said in a news release. For more on the discovery of Jefferson’s chem lab, see the video accompanying this article.
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“The experiments would be done at the higher level where the stone is nearly like a counter top, there may have been an iron plate or grill there”, Matt Schiedt, who is managing the project to renovate the University of Virginia Rotunda as part of John G. Waite Associates Architects, told the Charlottesville Newsplex. When it reopens to the public, the hearth and alcove will remain on public display.
