Thomas Jefferson’s design for a courthouse at Buckingham may have embodied his idea of public architecture for the new American republic, using permanent materials and classical Roman proportions to convey permanence, security, and civic importance. Archaeological evidence and the Jefferson-Yancey correspondence indicate that the building differed substantially from the 1873 courthouse and from the smaller Jefferson-designed courthouse in Charlotte County. One plan, based on the correspondence and excavation, shows an open first floor with seating probably under a balcony, wings intended for the offices of the Clerk of the Superior and County Courts, and an apse on the north end consistent with Jefferson’s Charlotte Courthouse design. A second plan, based on newspaper accounts of the 1869 fire, shows the area under the balcony partitioned off from the courtroom because the clerks’ offices were kept in the courthouse, while the wings or pavilions were being used as law offices. Reports from Buckingham County on February 26, 1869, said the courthouse had evidently been fired to destroy the clerks’ offices and that all county records were lost, while another account said the two wings were occupied by N.F. Bocock and John Hill as law offices and that J.H. Noble, C.Y. Hooper, D.A. Parrick, and A.J. Pendleton saved their books and papers. Interpretive landscaping outlines the courthouse layout, indicating that Jefferson’s courthouse was 12 feet wider than the 1873 courthouse, showing the eastern wall in brick pavement, defining the two pavilions with different colored brick pavers, marking the lesser colonnade extending east and west from the main building with smaller square pavers, and locating the two-column-deep main portico with six large column bases where they stood on Jefferson’s courthouse. The archival and archaeological record together suggest an impressive public building with a deep portico and a colonnade extending to the wings, analogous to the pavilions on the Lawn of the University of Virginia. Renderings show the flat and guttered roofs on the wings that Jefferson recommended in his July 12, 1822, letter to Yancey as more handsome and cheaper than common roofs, though the only suggested evidence that this recommendation was followed is a wing of the nearby Dr. Tucker house from the early 1830s, which has similar saw-tooth roofing; the alternative would have been a simple gable roof.