Financial History Issue 122 (Summer 2017) | Page 37
West Point Foundry office building with cupola.
The main masonry chimney for the original 1818 reverberatory air furnace is seen in this photograph
of the West Point Foundry Casting House amid a sprawling complex of buildings. In these shops,
thousands of smoothbore and rifled cannons were cast from 1818 through the Civil War.
inspector of ordnance at the military acad-
emy across the river, as the superintendent
for WPF. It was a propitious move.
Several artillery designers were experi-
menting with ways to give big guns better
range and hitting power. The focus was on
ways to strengthen the breach of the gun to
allow for more powerful charges without
bursting the barrel. Rear Admiral John A.
Dahlgren developed the beautiful and effec-
tive “soda-bottle” shape. In 1860, Parrott
developed a method of forming a strong
band of iron and fitting it over the breach of
a rifled cannon. The Parrott gun became the
defining artillery piece of the war.
“Other designers worked with several
different foundries,” said Forlow, “but the
Parrott process was proprietary to WPF.
The Confederates captured Parrotts when-
ever they could and tried to duplicate the
process. But they did not have the technol-
ogy or facilities.”
WPF was able to supply quantities of
Parrott guns and shells to the US Army
almost from the outbreak of war. Accord-
ing to Forlow, WPF was delivering 25 Par-
rott rifles and 7,000 projectiles a week by
September 1861.
President Abraham Lincoln vis-
ited WPF in June 1862 and watched a
demonstration firing of big 100- and 200-
pound Parrotts (Artillery in those days
was rated by the weight of the projectile).
By the end of the war, WPF had delivered
more than 2,700 Parrotts of all sizes and
more than 1.3 million projectiles.
The end of hostilities in 1865 naturally
brought a sharp reduction in military
orders, but WPF soldiered on for several
decades.
“WPF was an iron foundry,” said For-
low. “They also operated a small brass
foundry and worked with some soft steels.
But the Bessemer process took hold in
industry to make large quantities of steel
that were lighter and stronger than cast
or wrought iro n. WPF did not have the
space or the capital to rebuild as a steel
works. The owners proposed to the ordi-
nance bureau that they and one other
ironworks be kept operating, but that was
declined, severing their relationship with
the government.”
Ironically, it had been weight and
poor performance of iron cannon in
the Crimean War (1853–56) that led Sir
Henry Bessemer and others to develop
improved steelmaking. So rather than
being mourned as a victim of progress,
WPF should rather be lauded for taking
iron cannon-making to its highest point,
even after the presence of better materi-
als. They were like the last great clippers
that persisted decades after steamships
asserted primacy, or the Lockheed Con-
stellation and Douglas DC-6 that served
well into the jet age.
Fate was not kind to the WPF site. It
went through a series of owners, some
in ironwork and some in other forms of
manufacturing. Eventually the site fell to
looting and ruin. The ravine became a
dumping ground, and it is rumored that
several brick buildings in the area are built
partially from bricks scavenged from the
WPF site. An electric battery factory was
built on an adjacent site, contaminating
the lagoon with heavy metals. In 1983, the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
added the “Marathon Battery Corp.” site to
its priorities list for superfund remediation.
The site was taken off the list in 1996
and acquired by Scenic Hudson the fol-
lowing year. The Industrial Archaeology
Program at Michigan Tech University
collaborated on the excavation and resto-
ration. Several foundations remain, as well
as parts of the millrace. The only complete
building is the 1865 headquarters, built at
the high-water mark for WPF.
The restored park is open to the pub-
lic. Scenic Hudson runs organized tours,
some of them led by Mark Forlow.
Gregory DL Morris is an independent
business journalist, principal of Enter-
prise & Industry Historic Research
(www.enterpriseandindustry.com) and
an active member of the Museum’s edito-
rial board.
www.MoAF.org | Summer 2017 | FINANCIAL HISTORY 35