By Gregory DL Morris

Two hundred years ago, the industrial age in the United States got off to an early start along a brook in a ravine tumbling into the Hudson River opposite the Military Academy at West Point, New York. The West Point Foundry( WPF), actually in Cold Spring, grew to be a major manufacturing complex, vertically integrated from raw materials to finished goods, the likes of which would not become common in North American heavy manufacturing for decades.

Very little is left today on the site of the once-mighty WPF, but that which remains has been conscientiously preserved by a coalition led by the Scenic Hudson Land Trust. And while the WPF site makes for a charming and informative day trip by train from New York City, its wider legacy comprises a historical diaspora:

• WPF made the first locomotive manufactured in the United States, the Best Friend of Charleston, in 1831, as well as many other early locomotives.

• Both combatants in the epochal Battle of Hampton Roads during the American Civil War, the first-ever clash of ironclads, used WPF manufactured materials. The company made the engines for the steam frigate USS Merrimack that was rebuilt by the Confederacy as the CSS Virginia. WPF also made the XI-inch Dahlgren guns in the turret of the revolutionary USS Monitor.( Roman numerals are used to designate smoothbore naval artillery; rifled guns are designated in Arabic numerals.)

• WPF made many of the building fronts in New York City’ s historic Cast Iron District.

• WPF made cast-iron components for several surviving historic lighthouses, including Cape Canaveral, Florida; and Bodie Island, Cape Hattaras, North Carolina.

Ground was broken for WPF at the ravine outside Cold Spring in 1817; operations began in 1818. That was 34 years after the end of the War of Independence and just two years after the end of the War of 1812. All of the big guns in North America had been brought by colonizers, primarily

“ The Gun Foundry,” painted by John Ferguson Weir in 1864, is a Romantic-style amalgam of several processes at the West Point Foundry.

www. MoAF. org | Summer 2017 | FINANCIAL HISTORY 33