A Society for Industrial Archeology Presentation by Arron Kotlensky and Steve Walton

Thursday, November 20, 2025, 5 p.m. Eastern (US & Canada

From its beginnings in 1817 through the Civil War, the West Point Foundry of Cold Spring, New York stood out as a pioneer of heavy industry capable of making ordnance and durable goods that only a few peers could match. Envisioned as a producer of cannon for the U.S. Navy in the years after the War of 1812, the foundry’s deft leadership, supported by a highly skilled workforce, gained a reputation for producing not only large quantities of cannon year after year but also a wide range of durable, capital-intensive goods, such as steam engines and machinery for other industries. The West Point Foundry’s success lead to its steady expansion in a narrow valley that offered ample water power and the nearby Hudson River for waterborne transport. Though gaining its greatest share of national attention during the Civil War, the foundry’s success waned in the closing decades of the nineteenth century—with a dramatic loss in revenue owing to the Panic of 1907, the final owners of the foundry closed its operation in 1911 for good. Following years of salvage and decay, with nature taking root amongst its ruins, interest in the site of the West Point Foundry grew with its purchase by Scenic Hudson Land Trust in 1996, followed by eight years of intensive archaeological investigations undertaken by Michigan Technological University from 2001 to 2008. Building on years of hard-won research, Scenic Hudson developed the site into a passive preserve that visitors can visit today and appreciate through interpretive kiosks and reconstructed features set in a wooded landscape.

Arron Kotlensky cut his teeth in industrial archaeology at the West Point Foundry in 2004 and 2005 as a graduate student in the MTU Industrial Archeology masters program, where he focused on the foundry’s quite remarkable blast furnace. He returned to work at the site in 2012 as an archaeological monitor during construction of improvements and amenities for the current preserve. He returned to work on the site yet again in 2017, serving as lead author for the National Historic Landmark nomination of the West Point Foundry, leading to its successful designation in 2021. Today, Arron lives in Pittsburgh, Pa and serves as the archaeology group leader for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation but he still dreams of ways to finish the excavation of the blast furnace of the West Point Foundry.

Steven A. Walton is an associate professor of history at Michigan Tech and has served in numerous roles for the SIA over the years. He has been working on the textual side of the West Point Foundry since the mid-2000s when he visited the field school in Cold Spring. He has amassed a great deal of archival material on the West Point Foundry from the National Archives and various state archives, and was instrumental in getting the Kemble Family Papers fully organized and deposited in the NY State Archives in 2021. At some point, he’ll get the book on the history of the West Point Foundry finished, though the foundry will play a large role in his book on cannon foundries in America from the Revolution to the 1880s.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/99696474196?pwd=MajrheC4RXnUTxu8obqO9r56hbDda4.1

Meeting ID: 996 9647 4196
Passcode: 296787
One tap mobile
+12532158782,,91321889069#,,,,*187087# US (Tacoma)
+13462487799,,91321889069#,,,,*187087# US (Houston)

Join instructions:
https://zoom.us/meetings/91321889069/invitations?signature=anACOj7c_kfYpM19jktwPF_4ag3C6ZO0meMcBouT59o