UNDERSTANDING 19TH-CENTURYINDUSTRY

The West Point Foundry marked the beginning of America’s military-industrial complex. Archaeologists are learning how this sophisticated foundry operated.

By Hilary Davidson

HE WAROF 1812 WASA WAKE-UPCALLFOR JAMES

TMadison. It wasn’t just that the British had been able to sail up the Potomac and burn down the White House; what alarmed President Madison was America’s dependency on foreign-made weaponry. There were two small foundries in the new nation, but they weren’t capable of building heavy ordnance, and so the U.S. military was forced to employ French and Spanish cannons on the battlefield.

Madison’s solution was to establish four foundries that would specialize in the manufacturing of heavy guns. Pittsburgh, Richmond, and Georgetown were selected as locations, but the most important one was located in the village of Cold Spring, 50 miles north of New York City. The West Point Foundry was incorporated here in 1817 by a wealthy entrepreneur named Gouverneur Kemble, a man whose fortunes continued to rise in the decades to follow.

Located by the Hudson River, a superhighway of the 19th century, the foundry was protected by the presence of the West Point military academy, located on the opposite bank. Cold Spring was a perfect location for other reasons. The site was selected largely for its natural resources: there were nearby iron mines, the forested land offered wood for the furnaces, and a stream known as Foundry Brook provided water to power the entire operation. Ironically, it is nature that the archaeologists investigating the foundry site are struggling against today.

“Look, nature has grabbed it back,” says Patrick Martin, an archaeologist at Michigan Technological University (MTU), indicating the forested area where the foundry once stood. The remains of the foundry’s two- and threestory brick buildings are spread over approximately 87 acres. After its furnaces were shut down in 1911, nature moved in quickly to reclaim the territory.

The only structure still standing is the majestic 1865 red brick office building. It was constructed at the height of the foundry’s might and fame, in the days when 1,500 people worked here and the furnaces never cooled down. A shell of its former self, devoid of windows and even floors, the building nonetheless hints at the West Point Foundry’s former glory.

Martin has been guiding archaeological research on the site since 2001 when Scenic Hudson, Inc., the owners of the West Point Foundry Preserve, initiated a partnership with MTU to study the site. Scenic Hudson is an environmental organization working to preserve and restore the Hudson River and its riverfront as a public and natural resource. It purchased the property to protect its historical, archaeological, and ecological resources.

Wanting to develop the site into a public historical preserve, Scenic Hudson hired Martin and his MTU colleague, Timothy Scarlett, to investigate the foundry and assist in its interpretation. “It’s ironic for a facility as important as this, as historically significant as it is and as massive as it is, that there are these great gray areas of its history that can only be answered by archaeology,” says Martin.

This painting, titled “The Gun Foundry,” was done by John Ferguson Weir in 1866. It’s based on his extensive observations of the foundry’s operations.

Martin and Scarlett are pursuing two research objectives: unearthing information about the foundry’s technology, which was generally very sophisticated, and learning about the area’s social history and the everyday lives of the foundry’s employees. These objectives were chosen to provide insights into the genesis of the American Iron Age and the Industrial Revolution by discovering evidence of specific technological and social developments at the foundry that speak to these larger developments.

To date, their primary focus has been on the first objective; when they began, they knew a lot about what was produced at the foundry but almost nothing about how it was done. “We start with big questions and work our way down to small details,” Martin says, adding that these details help them answer the questions. “The site forces people to be nimble about coming up with solutions,” says Martin. “You can’t be satisfied with the easy solution. We’re about solving puzzles.”

In the summer of 2004, they managed to solve some of the puzzles concerning the blast furnace. Before they began to excavate the site, they didn’t know how the furnace’s blowing engine operated. After digging four six-square-foot units, their crew unearthed three iron hoops that were eight feet in diameter. “These are iron straps that would have gone around the tubs in a cylinder-based blowing machine,” says Scarlett. The discovery that it wasn’t a bellows machine furthered the researchers’ understanding of how the operation was powered.

The foundry started by smelting its own iron ore in the blast furnace, but fairly soon its smelting work was moved to another location and the furnace sat idle. This move coincided with a significant change in American industry: the switch from wood to coal to power plants. Historical accounts don’t explain the move, which may have been related to the wood-to-coal change in some way, or possibly to the availability of new, more desirable sources of iron ore, or been caused by some other factor. The researchers hope their investigation of the blast furnace will identify the cause. “As we’re digging up this blowing engine, we may find that it failed completely,” he says, which could suggest yet another reason for moving the smelting operation.

They also uncovered a wall that runs through three of the four units. While they have identified it as a weight-bearing wall because it widens towards its base, they’ve had to put further excavation on it on hold for the

Michigan Technological University graduate students excavate the waterway system beneath the blowing engine foundation.

moment because of safety concerns (one unit is about six feet deep, and its walls could cave in if it were deeper). “We’ve been making tremendous progress this year, and one of the ways we see that is through the number of new questions we can ask,” says Scarlett.

One of those questions is where the water was channeled after it was used to power the blowing engine of the blast furnace. Though the foundation of the blowing engine and the water wheel that generated its power are being exposed, the archaeologists aren’t certain of the answer. Water running near the furnace could possibly turn to steam, causing a potential hazard. There are some indications, however inconclusive, that the water passed beneath the furnace. Furthermore, changes and additions to the masonry structure could suggest technological changes, expansions, or perhaps something else.

Though West Point Foundry’s reputation is that of a highly sophisticated, pioneering operation, a few of the archaeological discoveries have suggested that in some regards it may not have been that advanced. “The area of the blast furnace is slightly weird,” says Martin. The blast engine was powered by Foundry Brook, the source of all of the foundry’s power, but the water wasn’t channeled away from it afterwards. “All of the contemporary designs focus on having drains to get water away from the furnace when it’s spent,” says Martin. “But here, the water appears to be channeled beneath the furnace into a pond.”

That man-made body of water was called Battery Pond, and its very name suggests a reservoir system that recycled water power. The archives make no mention of it except for marking it on maps, and as yet nothing has been uncovered that explains how the system worked. “It’s very strange,” he adds.

Because the foundry was powered by water, understanding the subterranean network of channels is an essential part of the investigation. In 2003 the crew spent weeks using ground-penetrating radar to assess the integrity of the site and to hunt for tailraces, underground channels that transported water. They also used soil resistivity, a type of remote sensing, to look for buried features, such as underground walls. “Figuring out the water network will help us compute the amount of power the foundry was using,” says Scarlett. “Then there’s the quizzical thing, the fact that they made steam engines, yet they seemed to prefer water power for their own operations.”

IN THE 20THCENTURY, THESITE WAS USEDBYCOMPANIES producing materials as diverse as furniture and silk, and for a time the site was abandoned. A battery manufacturer polluted the nearby land and water with cadmium, and the area eventually became a Super Fund cleanup site, which in turn called attention to the foundry’s archaeological significance.

Because of the site’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places, the Environmental Protection Agency required that the area be subject to an archaeological investigation before the cleanup. The first archaeological project, which took place in 1979, examined the historical record and surveyed the site. In 1991, researchers discovered the remains of a canon-testing facility, and in 1993 they excavated a group of foundry workers’ homes, recovering 145,000 artifacts that are stored in nearby Orange County. Martin’s crew has not yet examined them, though they hope to do so in the near future. “It’s mostly domestic trash,” he says of the collection, which he’s somewhat familiar with. Martin expects the artifacts to be much more pertinent to the social phase of the investigation.

Historical accounts suggest that Kemble studied cannon-making in Spain and served as an assistant to a prominent naval officer, Commodore Stephen Decatur, in the Barbary Coast Wars, during which the U.S. battled the Barbary States in the early 19th century. He was also the brother-in-law of the Secretary of the Navy, a connection that landed him a bonanza in the form of guaranteed contracts for munitions. Thus the privately owned foundry equipped the nation’s military. “This was the start of the military-industrial complex,” says Martin. A quarter of the initial capital investment actually came from the U.S. Treasury as an advance against the government’s first order. At the height of the foundry’s success during the Civil War it had $100,000 in monthly contracts to equip the navy alone.

Looking at this bucolic photograph of Foundry Brook, it’s hard to imagine that it served as the source of water power for a major industrial plant.

The foundry’s operations and innovations, according to historical documents, went well beyond its military work. It was one of the earliest vertically integrated industrial sites in the nation. The foundry controlled every step, from processing iron ore to finishing the manufactured products. Until 1838 the company ran a secondary plant on the west side of Manhattan, and it was there that the first locomotive built in America, named the Best Friend, was created in 1830.The two operations built steam engines, sugar mills and cotton presses, church bells, an iron ship, storefronts, and the cast iron valves and pipes for water systems, such as New York City’s Croton Aqueduct.

But the foundry’s primary purpose was producing arms, and its most famous innovation was the Parrott gun, a rifled cannon that was both more mobile and more accurate than its contemporaries. Union forces first used it to powerful effect in the Battle of Bull Run. The Parrott gun is widely viewed as a major factor in deciding the outcome of the Civil War. While the war created an insatiable demand for all that the foundry could produce, the cessation of battle wrought its demise. The military cancelled contracts, demand for consumer goods was low, and steelmaking was in ascendancy. Iron making was no longer cutting-edge technology, and the foundry went into receivership in 1889. HEMAPPINGOF THE WEST POINT FOUNDRY WASA KEY

Tissue, in part because of the complexity of the site. It wasn’t even clear where some of the buildings had stood—many of the fallen bricks were appropriated to create a pathway a few years back—and there were questions about what purposes each building served, and how the foundry changed and evolved over time. Martin and his students had access to 19th-century maps of the site, but they soon realized that these maps were inaccurate. “Some early maps were drawn up for insurance purposes, and they were adequate for that,” Martin says. “The prob-

lem was, the maps that were drawn up later were based on the first maps, so they couldn’t help but be wrong.” In 2002, the researchers spent weeks mapping the site with a total station. They produced a digital map and attached archival information in various file forms to it. Much of the archival data came from the research of archaeologist Elizabeth Norris who, in 2001, visited nine archives in three Archaeologist Patrick Martin stands above excavators working within the watercourse beneath the blowing engine foundation. The excavators are learning how the blowing engine operated. states to collect data. Her finds included photographs that clearly depict the interior and exterior of different buildings when the foundry was still a thriving enterprise. A photograph of the interior of the Boring Mill has helped to guide the excavation there. With the help of the photograph they discovered the base of a crane that was part of a large wheel lathe. They also uncovered a structural wall, a wooden floor with joists underneath, and a sand floor. “We’re taking samples so we can figure out what was on the floorboards,” says Norris. One of the techniques used to identify the particles on the floorboards is magnetic separation. A magnet is run through soil samples to capture tiny metal particles that are subsequently analyzed under a microscope. By identifying these particles, the researchers are better able to deduce the locations and types of the various manufacturing processes. For example, wrought iron and cast iron objects were This cast iron pig marked “WPF 1828” is asso- worked on different machines and served different purciated with the foundry’s blast furnace. poses. Wrought iron, the stronger of the two, likely was

used, among other things, for drive shafts in steam engines. Cast iron was more likely used for steam engine cylinders or cannons. Consequently, areas with a large quantity of cast iron particles could be places where cannons were produced. A concentration of wrought iron particles indicates other types of manufacturing.

The archaeologists know that the mill was powered by a 36-foot water wheel, but they had never before seen the iron conglomerate that covered part of the floor. What they discovered was that the foundry actually recycled slag, the waste product of iron ore, and used it for construction purposes. Battery Pond was lined with the same material. “Ironworks all over the world used waste creatively,” Martin adds, “but I’ve never seen anything like this.”

While the archaeologists are getting a sense of how the foundry worked, they are just beginning to explore the human relationships that also powered the site. “We want to explore the relationship between capital and labor, and between natives and immigrants—the core set of relationships in U.S. history,” says Martin. He notes that there is very limited information of this sort in the archaeological record. The excavation work thus far has turned up little in the way of personal artifacts, with the exception of a few pipes and buttons.

However, probate records from the Putnam County archives show that some of the foundry’s managers built and rented houses to the workers. “It looks like a side business,” Martin says, “and it’s not really a surprise, but it’s something we need to understand.”

The archaeological project is being conducted with the idea of public interpretation in mind. The high degree of integrity and preservation of the site, its location in the picturesque Hudson Valley, an hour away by railroad from New York City, and Scenic Hudson’s mission all indicate that the site could become an educational attraction. The historical and archaeological research will help in decisions about how, or if, the site should be developed for that purpose.

One of the ironies to the archaeologists is that as important as the foundry was in its day, its existence was frequently ignored in its own era. While Kemble hosted literary salons and befriended several painters of the Hudson

River School, the foundry was rarely written about or painted (Weir’s work is the anomaly). “The Hudson River painters would paint heroic landscapes without the foundry—they would actually put trees in where the foundry stood,” says Scarlett. Finally, almost 200 years after it was built, archaeologists are putting the foundry back into the picture.

This is the last intact arch of the blast furnace that was used to smelt iron. The furnace later sat idle as the smelting work was moved to another location. The archaeologists hope to learn what caused this change.

HILARY DAVIDSON has written for Discover, University of Toronto Magazine, and Frommer’s Travel Guides.

To learn more about the West Point Foundry Archaeology Project, visit the Web site www.westpointfoundry.org.