Hello all! My name is Janelle Schaeffer. I am an undergraduate student at Michigan State University, majoring in Anthropology and German. This is my second field season at the West Point Foundry. It has been very exciting returning to the foundry and the experience has been very valuable to me. The archaeology that we are doing at the Molding Shop is much different then my previous experience at the East Bank House in 2005. I am excited to be doing more industrial archaeology than historic archaeology.
This week has been a very busy and exciting one. As we come to a close on our excavation units, we are also preparing for backfilling next week. We had a rainy day at the beginning of the week which gave us an opportunity to catch up on some lab work. This week I spent most of my time working on the new excavation unit, N64.00 E22.50, with Mike Deegan. We opened this unit to hopefully expose a corner a very large brick feature that is present in three of our other excavation units. This brick wall is very unique because it is a bit askew from the doorway to the casting/molding shop built in 1817. It is also very deep and is in excellent condition. There is a layer of mortar on top of it that is almost completely intact. We believe that this wall was built during the Cornell period of the Foundry. Unfortunately we have not exposed the whole wall, just two sides of it.
The rest of the crew spent most of the week profiling the cupula furnace units. At the end of last week, they found the bottom of the unit, so they did not continue with excavations this week. Because of the size of this unit, it took them most of the week to draw the walls and soil profiles. We also did some backfilling this week. We filled in my old excavation unit N53.95 E30.29, N53.48 E31.34 and the casting pit. In addition some of the maintenance members of the Village of Cold Spring did us a huge favor and helped us move some of the woodchips for backfilling to a more convenient location. This helped us tremendously (with a ratio of 70 our hours to 3 or their hours) and saved us many hours of work. We truly appreciate it.
We had some important visitors to the site this week too. Douglas Mackey and Stacey Matson-Zuvic from the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) came to the site to see the archaeology that we have been doing, and talked to Scenic Hudson about the future plans of the West Point Foundry. We also had a few other visitors with Scenic Hudson tour the site. Dr. Pat Martin also joined us for a few days this week and led the tours. Unfortunately he only spent a few days with us.
