Michigan Tech gets $274,414 to send West Point Foundry artifacts home

HOUGHTON, Mich. — For most of the last two decades, a collection of artifacts from one of the most important ironworks in early American history has been stored on the Michigan Tech campus in Houghton. Now the university has the money to send it home.

Michigan Technological University’s Social Sciences Department is receiving $274,414 from the National Park Service’s Save America’s Treasures program, a matching grant that brings the project to $548,829, TV6 reported. The money will pay to conserve, re-inventory and re-document the finds and then return them to the West Point Foundry site in Cold Spring, New York.

The work is expected to take two years. Associate professor of anthropology and archaeology Samuel Sweitz is leading it with fellow principal investigators Steven Walton and Timothy Scarlett.

“It’s a great opportunity for the department and the university,” Sweitz told TV6. “This is a great example of the kinds of partnerships that can be handled between either nonprofit or private institutions, and educational institutions like Michigan Tech.”

Why the foundry matters. The West Point Foundry opened in 1817 on the Hudson River and operated until about 1911. From 1818 through the end of the Civil War it was a leading supplier of cannon and other ordnance to the U.S. Army and Navy, according to the National Park Service’s National Historic Landmark nomination for the site. Robert Parrott, its superintendent, gave his name to the Parrott rifle, a cannon widely used in the Civil War.

“The building up of the U.S. military, giving it the capacity to build its own armaments and munitions,” Sweitz said of the foundry’s role. “But it also played an important role in casting iron pieces for commercial use.”

How the finds ended up in Houghton. Michigan Tech’s industrial archaeology program excavated the site from 2000 to 2008 in partnership with Scenic Hudson, the land trust that owns it and runs it as the West Point Foundry Preserve. Students and researchers dug up some 145,000 foundry-related artifacts and traced the footprints of about 15 buildings, according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The materials came back to Houghton for student research.

“So, what that funding will help us do is to primarily hire a conservator to help us conserve these artifacts,” Sweitz said. “We’ll go back through and we’ll re-inventory them, we’ll re-document them... Then repatriate them back to New York.”

What it means. Because Save America’s Treasures grants require a match, by our math the federal share is half of the project’s cost; the rest comes from non-federal sources. For Michigan Tech students, the next two years mean hands-on conservation and cataloging work on a nationally significant collection before it leaves the Copper Country for good. For history fans, the move puts the artifacts back with the site they came from, the preserve in Cold Spring.

Sources:
TV6 / Upper Michigan’s Source, “Michigan Tech receives federal matching grant to return West Point Foundry artifacts home,” Oct. 21, 2026 (grant amounts, investigators, quotes, dates, 2000-2008 excavation, Scenic Hudson), https://www.uppermichiganssource.com/2026/10/22/michigan-tech-receives-federal-matching-grant-return-west-point-foundry-artifacts-home/
National Trust for Historic Preservation, “Industrial Strength: Cold Spring, N.Y.” (145,000 artifacts, building footprints), https://savingplaces.org/stories/industrial-strength-cold-spring-ny
National Park Service, National Historic Landmark nomination, West Point Foundry Archeological Site (years of operation, ordnance supplier), https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalhistoriclandmarks/upload/West_Point_Foundry_NHL_WSecFinal_2021-08-03_Redacted.pdf
Photo: Jcvertin, “Michigan Tech campus, fall 2018,” Oct. 24, 2018, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), cropped and color-adjusted, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michigan_Tech_campus,_fall_2018..jpg

Houghton

Tags: Houghton · Michigan Tech · Industrial Archaeology · Grants · National Park Service · History