History Unearthed

Hello Everyone,

      Here is an interview I did for the Herald Standard newspaper from Uniontown, Pennsylvania. It was a little short notice and off the cuff. Over all a good description of what is going on in Brownsville!

Cast iron bridge foundry being unearthed - heraldstandard.com: Local News

 Hello All,

       Check out this great news article about the John Snowdon and Son's Foundry: Happy Memorial Day!

Cast iron bridge foundry being unearthed - heraldstandard.com: Local News

Snowdon Foundry Weekend Work Day 7-8.

Hello Everyone,


             Updates didn't occur these past couple of days due to a lack of Internet service. Anyhow, I'm back to report on this weekend's activity at the Snowdon and Sons Vulcan Iron and Machine Works. This weekend was the Market Street Arts Festival in downtown Brownsville, Pennsylvania. Like last year, this is a time when we coordinate Brownsville Archaeology Month to coincide with the festival. After all, isn't archaeology an art? Sure it is, we paint and sculpt the past as well as any artist! So to say the least, we had quite a few visitors to our site to check it out. Although we have been excavating for over two weeks, we still have yet to see any Brownsville Council person, the mayor, or any Brownsville Historical Society official at the site, let alone anyone from the Fayette County Historical Society. A shame really, as these are the people who we expect to advocates for the town, but really only care about the limited world views that they have. Anyhow, here are the pics from the weekend!  

Pattern Shop Wall

Pattern Shop Wall Excavation Block with Security Fence

The Pattern Shop Foundation extends 6 feet below ground surface

Interior Pattern Shop Excavation Block

Liz taking elevations

Left to right: Jonathan Crise, Kyle Norman, and Marc Henshaw (Archaeology Dude)

Joanna Furnace

      In April, the Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology’s annual conference was held in Morgantown, Pennsylvania. The John Shrader Chapter 21 of the SPA was kind enough to host the conference in their neck of Pennsylvania, namely Berks County. The John Shrader Chapter has an interesting project on their hands, namely the remains of the Joanna iron furnace. I toured this extremely well-preserved industrial site that represents Pennsylvania's early foray into iron smelting.

     Started by Samuel Potts, Thomas Rutter III, Thomas May, and Thomas Bull in 1791, the furnace stands as a monument to early iron smelters capitalizing on Pennsylvania's wealth of natural resources. Local iron was plentiful, as were the necessary trees to turn into charcoal in order to fuel the blast. Until the 1850's, Joanna was a cold blast, single stack, furnace powered by water supplied by Hay Creek. The conversion to steam power boosted efficiency and untethered the furnace operation from the whims of the naturally flowing creek.

     

     I was luck enough to meet Richard Nearhood and Charles Jacob of the John Shrader Chapter to give me an extensive tour of the ironworks. As an industrial archaeologist, the furnace represents more than the sum of its physical parts. Questions arose that are sometimes hard to answer when first visiting a site. Where did the workers come from? Where did they live? What was the relationship with this furnace operation with others in the area? How did this industry fit into a wider distribution network of colliers, furnaces, canals, and railroads? From the beginning of Joanna Furnace in 1791 until the 1840's, Pennsylvania was providing for the basic needs of those pushing westward and the newly formed middle classes emerging from industrialization. It is then no wonder that the furnace was producing nails, stoves, farm implements, and a variety of cast iron products to supply the growing demand of a moving population. A moving population not only physically, but socioeconomically as well.

     
     I have here a variety of pictures that I took while on my tour, so that you my readers can experience this beautifully preserved artifact from a little studied industry.

Industrial archaeology: a race against time, as always.

Image via Wikipedia

After reading in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette (02/09/10) http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10040/1034454-437.stm about the plans to demolish Andrew Carnegie’s former Pittsburgh Locomotive Works, I immediately understood the the author’s outcry for public support. I also immediately understood was there was no public outcry for the old abandoned buildings. Why? The author of this article asks this very question. Why is the industrial past so esoteric to the people who live in these areas?



In the Monongahela Valley, industrialization and the subsequent de-industrialization is on the minds of every coal miner, steelworker, railroader, and heavy industry worker who resides along the river. During political elections, industry and placing people back to work is the number one concern in the valley. Yet in the industrial past, where tens of thousands of workers and their families endured the harsh reality of the blast furnaces, or the subterranean darkness of the coalmines, their voices are mute. In her dissertation, Hope and Rust (2008), Anna Storm points to this very issue. Perhaps the past is too close to these people, these workers. After all, the outcry from the community often comes from the descendant community of the workers themselves, the sons, daughters, grandchildren, etc. Granted, the time that has lapsed since the days of the Carnegie Locomotive Works would make this site invaluable to the descendant community. But where is the outcry?

Perhaps the silence is a signal of something else, an indicator that goes beyond the simple value of these sites. This is the silence of a dead endemic community. The people who were the closest, who valued and cherished these buildings are gone. Not physically dead perhaps, but gone- moved away to a different community. De-industrialization displaces people, forces them to move out of stable once communities, where families "inherited" their lines of work. Grandfather, fathers and sons worked in the mills, immigrants moved into the community to find stability, the community and the family was stable. After the closure of the mills, mines, factories, the workforce is pressured to change, to adapt, and in some cases become mobile. The lack of voices is an indicator of community health, the decedent community health.

Industrial archaeology, as others in the field have stated, cannot simply take the remains of structures at face value. Preservation starts at the community level, by involving the community and targeting those who have a vested interest. But as seen here in Pittsburgh and the surrounding Monongahela Valley, those most vested in these structures may in fact be gone. It is our job as archaeologists to educate, involve, and reach out to the existing communities in a way that creates value for them in these sites and structures. We must create the value in preservation verse destruction of these buildings and places. We cannot simply say they are valuable because of age or historical association. We must say they are valuable because if they are lost, a piece of the larger community, economy, and wider heritage of an area is lost.