Graduate

2007

The development of a National Register Historic District nomination of Lake Linden as well as the proposal of various interpretive plans provides a framework for examining its past. The village's history is due entirely to its location on Torch Lake, a deep glacial body of water stretching far into the Keweenaw's interior. Although European settlement along its shore was recorded as early as the 1850s, the turning point came in 1867 when Alexander Agassiz, President of the Calumet & Hecla Mining Company, recognized Torch Lake's value as a mill site. Many French Canadians immigrated to the village, following the lead of lumber baron Joseph Grégoire. Because Torch Lake allowed shipment directly into the Keweenaw, Lake Linden became an important shipping center, which promoted the growth of successful businesses. As the price of mining copper underground grew costlier, C&H and Lake Linden's prosperity continued when the company incorporated a process to further extract copper from the stamp sand which had accumulated for decades in Torch Lake. Today, very little of the mill site remains, concealing an aspect of the past so important to the village. However, extant are a variety of commercial buildings, public buildings, and working-class residences, all of which are equally telling of the village's history. This thesis considers all of these aspects of Lake Linden's story and presents interpretive ideas that could be used to preserve and promote its unique history.

Map courtesy of Keweenaw National Historic Park.

2007

The company town is a settlement based around a single business enterprise, often industrial in nature. Industrial sites, depending on their product, tended to be in remote and often isolated settings. In order to have a steady and reliable workforce, companies needed to provide a community to house their employees. The residential settlements took on various forms and sizes depending on location and need. For those industries that were isolated, the company needed to provide and finance more development within the community creating residential, commercial, and civic elements. This included the provision of stores, schools, and churches in addition to housing. Company housing, in particular, acted as a means to attract, retain, and sometimes control employees. Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula had numerous company towns or locations to facilitate the various copper mining companies in the area. Due to the remoteness of the Keweenaw, company housing became an important aspect to attract employees of all levels. This thesis focuses specifically on the housing provided to the managerial personnel of the Quincy Mining Company, Calumet & Hecla, and the Copper Range Company, the three largest and well-known companies of the area. The managerial housing reveals the employment hierarchy at the mine as well as the hierarchy within the management personnel itself. The homes also indicated the three companies’ similarities and differences in their approach to company housing. The thesis includes discussions of specific housing at each company location, the individual companies’ approaches to alterations and other related issues, along with the intentional or unintentional messages sent by the houses.

MacNaughton House (C & H) - Curto Collection, Album 12 #070 in the KNHP Archives

Current day photo of Quincy's Agent's House - taken by Shannon Bennett

Front Elevation of Hubbard House (Copper Range) - Eschweiler Drawing Collection 001 in the Wisconsin Architectural Archives

2007

Finnish immigrants entered Michigan’s Copper Country, ostensibly between 1885 and 1905, as a tabla rasa to the industrial setting. Their experiences in the Copper Country mines led some of these immigrants to formulate a proactive response via direct action against the hegemony of Copper Country monopoly capital. This thesis analyzes this challenge to the Copper Country social milieu by using the written record and material culture of Finnish immigrant socialist-unionists. This thesis analyzes the construction of buildings, organization of cultural institutions and printing of socialist-unionist publications that directly challenged the mining company oligarchy.

2006

In 1827, the proprietors of the West Point Foundry in Cold Spring, New York began operating a charcoal-fueled blast furnace adjacent to the foundry complex. Through the efforts of artisans and managers alike, the furnace successfully produced pig iron mainly for use at the West Point Foundry, but also provided pig iron to other iron industries in the Hudson River valley during the 1830s. Despite their success in making a quality product, managers ceased operating the furnace by 1844 due to external economic pressures. To reveal the cultural influences that shaped the history of the foundry blast furnace, the present study incorporated analysis of written and archaeological evidence, supplemented with metallurgical analysis of product materials collected from the site. Evidence from each perspective suggests that the managers and artisans of the furnace attempted to maintain a cost-effective enterprise by refining both operating techniques and technological management, while maintaining production of high quality pig iron. Although longer-term operation proved elusive, the history of the West Point Foundry blast furnace represents an example of industrial adaptation of established technologies and knowledge within the dynamic economic conditions of antebellum America.

2006

A towering shaft-rockhouse was once a common feature of the copper mining landscape across Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula. Shaft-rockhouses protected the shaft opening, supported the hoisting ropes, and housed the machinery required for rock sorting and breaking. Starting in the mid 1880s, the mining industry constructed dozens of the structures throughout the district. Once introduced, shaft-rockhouses remained the primary structures at the mines until the death of the local industry in the 1960s. Far from a revolutionary invention, the introduction of the shaft-rockhouse was the result of nearly forty years of structural evolution at the mines. Likewise, the continued success of the structures came from small changes in the flow of materials rather than the introduction of new technologies; the last shaft-rockhouses built contained the same basic machinery as the first shaft-rockhouses. Although shaft-rockhouses performed nearly identical tasks, their exterior forms varied widely. Trade journals, company records, historic photographs and the physical characteristics of several remaining structures show that their designs depended on much more than the central function of raising and breaking rock. The geology of the area, mining laws, construction materials, and a few specific functional differences came into play in giving the shaft-rockhouses such variant forms along the mineral range. Finally, the uncommon height and massing of the shaft-rockhouses made them unmistakable symbols of the mining industry. Frequently featured in historic photographs of the area, the shaft-rockhouses provided context and identity in many images. Today, although they no longer perform their mining functions, the few remaining examples continue to serve as important landmarks on the modern landscape.

2006

The East Bank House sits on a leveled terrace overlooking much of the West Point Foundry, in Cold Spring, NY. The foundry was one of America’s largest and most successful ironworks throughout the 19^th century. Purportedly built in 1844 for one of the company’s engineers, the East Bank House later became a boarding house for foundry employees, standing until 1919 when it was destroyed by fire. While little documentary evidence exists, the scale of the structure and its proximity to the workplace is emblematic of other industrial manager’s houses from the 19^th century. Management of large scale industrial operations occasionally attempted to communicate power through the utilization of management housing as intentional symbols of socioeconomic class, status, and authority. This thesis analyzes the results of the 2005 fieldwork at the East Bank House, paying specific attention to the use of the yard space immediately surrounding the structure, considering consumption and disposal patterns through time.

2005 -- Supported by Scenic Hudson.

This thesis documents the historical and archaeological investigation of the ca. 1827-1844 blast furnace at the West Point Foundry in Cold Spring, New York. Established in 1817, to provide the United States with a reliable domestic producer of ordnance, the foundry also manufactured a variety of other iron products, including steam engines, sugar mills, iron pipes, and some of the nation's earliest locomotives. It was an early example of a vertically-integrated iron production facility.

Little information was known about the blast furnace that operated during this period. Previous archaeological surveys of the site called for further study of the unusual arrangement of the waterpower system and the blast technology that powered the furnace. The archaeological remains at the site and comparative analysis of both 18th and 19th century blast furnaces suggest that, while the West Point Foundry was a leader in the industrial iron manufacturing in the mid 19th century, its blast furnace relied on traditional 18th century technology.

2005 -- partially supported by the National Science Foundation

The archaeologists' ethical obligation to data and data sets is as important as their obligation to protect sites, include descendant communities, and publish results in a timely manner. However, discussions of such an obligation are rarely included in archaeological literature dealing with ethics. This thesis examines the archaeologists' obligation to digital data sets, specifically geographic information systems (GIS) data, by creating a 'living document' using data collected during a two-week international field seminar on the Norwegian Island of Spitsbergen, part of the larger Svalbard archipelago. One of the main problems of not having a structured method for organizing GIS data centers on future usability of a project's data set (i.e. adding survey data to a base map). Specifically, without a developed concern for the future use of a data set, GIS information is in danger of being created that cannot be added to at a future data. This presents numerous problems for the archaeological community since projects commonly involve multi-year time scales. The coming-and-going of students who have varying levels of involvement, from simple excavation to creating the base map used for all future investigations, exacerbates this situation. This thesis presents an organization scheme for use with archaeological data, making use of the geodatabase structure created in 2001 by Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI). This new data structure allows for unparalleled control of spatial data, such as assigning drop-down menu style controls in a feature's attribute table and reducing the total number of system files from dozens or even hundreds to a single file. The goal of this project, besides creating a set of GIS data that could be used by future researchers, is to begin the dialogue on the archaeologist's obligations to data sets.

2005 -- Supported by the U.S. Forest Service

Black River Harbor Park, situated along Lake Superior, offers a public picnic area, camping area, harbor, and docking facilities. Lake Nesbit Organizational Camp provides a seasonal camp that accommodates approximately 120 children. The Ottawa National Forest currently maintains each of these sites. The Civilian Conservation Corps built these facilities to address economic concerns in the facilities’ regions. During the early 1900s, the economy in the UP saw a downturn after the areas two major industries, mining and lumbering, drastically cut-down their activity in the region. Due to the economy, organizations within the region could not afford a camp of their own. In response to this need and a growing demand for recreational facilities within the nation’s forests and parks, the Ottawa National Forest, as administrators of the CCC, established Camp Nesbit centrally within the western UP. In Gogebic County, another encampment of the CCC addressed Gogebic County’s needs for recreational development, including the development of Black River Harbor Park. The counties recreational areas would be a gift to citizens and visitors of Gogebic County. However, unlike Camp Nesbit, the county provided these recreational areas in hopes to attract tourists who would boost the county’s failing economy.

2005 -- Supported by the National Park Service, Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve

Coal Creek, located in the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, Alaska, was the site of extensive twentieth-century placer gold mining. The archaeological documentation of the cultural features of this landscape provided the opportunity for interpreting the transformation of this cultural landscape. The mining technologies used on the creek progressed from simple drift and open-cut mining in the early years of the century to a California-type stacker dredge operated between 1936 and 1976, and finally mechanized open-cut mining between 1972 and 1986. Archaeological survey and archival research conducted by Michigan Technological University graduate students identified cultural landscape changes at Coal Creek, including early mining sites, institutional work camps, equipment scatters, trash dumps, and the movement of the dredge through the valley between 1936 and 1976. This thesis provides an overview of placer mining technology, a brief history of Coal Creek mining, and interpretation of the cultural landscape changes. The thesis also describes the structure and potential uses of the Geographic Information System (GIS) database that includes all the archaeological feature data collected during the project.

2005 -- Supported by Scenic Hudson.

The history of the West Point Foundry in Cold Spring, New York is a significant part of America's past that the public overlooks. Established in 1817, the West Point Foundry operated for nearly a century and manufactured many important artifacts of American history. These artifacts include the Parrott gun, which helped the Union Army and Navy win the Civil War, the first three American locomotives, and the first iron ship in the United States Navy. Part of the foundry’s success was the boring mill complex where all large products were machined before shipment.

The investigation of the boring mill complex at the West Point Foundry required more than just archaeological excavation. It required the examination of many historic documents about the foundry in order to understand the development of the complex. It required a search through many secondary sources about the function of boring machines in order to understand the processes that occurred inside the buildings. It also required analyzing the archaeological artifacts in order to understand the activity areas within the complex. This presentation will discuss the archaeological excavation that took place in the summer of 2004, and present the conclusions formed after the field data was analyzed.

2004 -- Supported by the City of Houghton, Michigan.

This thesis is the product of a year of work in the library and in the field documenting the archaeology and history of the Huron Mine Complex. The ruins of the Huron Mine Complex are largely located within the limits of the City of Houghton, Portage Township, Michigan, and include the remains of a dam, reservoir, stamp mill, tramway, and some workers' houses. The complex forms the largest, most complete, and representative industrial archaeological site on municipal property. The Huron Mine began in the 1850s with the largest mineral tract in the Copper Country. In the 1860s the mine tested and publicized experimental copper milling technologies. Under the name Houghton, the mine of the 1870s pioneered the tribute system of mining on a large scale. In the 1880s and early 1890s the Huron attempted to compete with other important mines of the district, but it failed ultimately to sustain profits. Even though the mine was famous for technological innovations in the 1860s, the mine is here referred to as a "frontier" mine largely on the basis of the archaeological evidence of the dam, which places the mining complex materially closer to the land and more dependent on the whims of nature than history alone would imply. Because the mine never paid dividends to its stockholders, the study of the Huron Mine is a study of technological failure. But it is atypical of failed Michigan copper mines of the 19th century, which were usually short-term ventures. The Huron was active for almost 40 years. This work attempts to unravel the various strands of historical and archaeological evidence pointing to a variety of causes for its changing fortunes. The landscape is discussed at various scales to provide a fuller context for the historical events recounted.

2004

This report outlines the various bridge designs currently in use on the Alaska Railroad (ARR). Information for this report came from a Determination of Eligibility (DOE) project carried out on behalf of the Alaska Railroad, HDR-Alaska, McGinley Kaslow and Associates, LLP, and Cultural Resource Consultants, Anchorage. It was the intention of the ARR to study its bridges and determine with a single survey which would be eligible under the guidelines of Section 106 of the National Register of Historic Places for inclusion onto the register. Previously, the railroad determined eligibility for each bridge individually at the time of its rehabilitation, since federal funds used for this work required eligibility determination for potentially historic properties.

The ARR is a full service rail carrier, offering freight and passenger services from its Gulf of Alaska ports to the interior city of Fairbanks. Its 169 bridges cross rivers, creeks, and seasonally wet areas. About half of these spans are treated timber and steel-pile trestles, the rest are standard steel designs, typical of those used across North America. While typical in design, some of the steel bridges are surplus military-designed I-beam and pony truss spans, acquired after the end of World War II from the United States Government, the owner of the railroad until its sale to the state of Alaska in 1984. Since the completion of the railroad in 1923, all the bridges have undergone rehabilitation, the majority (631) have been completely replaced with earthen roadbed. Once the railroad was completed, the railroad filled these cheap and quickly built bridges using instead culverts to maintain drainage under the roadbed. Bridge engineers continue to improve the quality of the bridges by using additional bracing, stronger fasteners, and modern materials like steel piles and concrete decks and caps with the goal of reducing maintenance costs and improving safety for passengers and freight.

2004 -- Supported by Scenic Hudson.

Waterpower: A Geophysical and Archaeological Investigation of the Waterpower System at the West Point Foundry, Cold Spring, New York, describes the results of ground penetrating radar surveys and archaeological excavation undertaken by Michigan Technological University (MTU) archaeologists during the summer of 2003 at the West Point Foundry, Cold Spring, New York. 2003 constituted MTU's second field season at the foundry. Fieldwork concentrated on the foundry's waterpower system, an intricate network of surface and subsurface drains, races, flumes, waterwheels, turbines, dams, and ponds that powered operations and regulated water flow throughout the site. Archaeologists utilized non-destructive geophysical technology, which expedited survey, facilitated placement of excavation units, and provided a model for future archaeogeophysical research at industrial sites. Features discovered during excavation provided valuable information pertaining to the waterpower system's construction and its functions. Data from ground penetrating radar surveys, archaeological excavation, historical photographs, documents, and maps permitted the development of a provisional chronology of the development of various components of the West Point Foundry's waterpower system. Information gathered during this project serves as an aid in site interpretation and rehabilitation.

GPR Survey

Flume Pipe Slide

2004 -- Supported by National Park Service, Historical Resource Study & the Keweenaw National Historic Park.

Starting from the work of Professor Rudolph J. Vecoli - who wrote extensively on the topic of Italian immigration and is also one of the first to have written specifically about Italian immigrants to the mines of Lake Superior - and Professor Russell M. Magnaghi - who wrote particularly on the Italians of Upper Michigan and interviewed some of them in the 1980s - this work tries to identify and characterize the Italians that came to Michigan’s Houghton County during the years between 1860 and 1930. Besides including names and numbers of the members of the Italian community of Houghton County, this work provides an overview of their regions of origin, their jobs in Houghton County, the areas where they preferred to settle and the relations among origins, jobs, organizations and patterns of settlement.

Page of the Guida degli Italiani della Copper Country published in 1910.

Front page of the Pro Nobis, a review published by the benevolent society Supreme Legion of the Knights of Romulus in Calumet (Legione Suprema dei Cavalieri di Romolo).