EAST LANSING, Mich. – What started as a simple hammock installation has led to MSU workers Detection of more than a century-old part of the university’s history.
Employees of the school’s Department of Infrastructure Planning and Facilities were digging holes near student residence halls near West Circle Drive in June when they encountered an “impenetrable, hard surface underground,” MSU said in a statement Wednesday.
Workers at first thought they had discovered a large boulder or the foundation of an ancient building. Workers contacted MSU’s on-campus archeology program, and employees referred back to old maps to determine what workers had dug up to be the foundation of the university’s first observatory, which was constructed in 1881.
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The observatory was built by then-Professor Rolla Carpenter and is located behind the current Wills house. Carpenter graduated from Michigan Agricultural College in 1873 and taught mathematics, astronomy, and French and civil engineering, according to the statement. It was built in 1927 for the United States Bureau of Meteorology, but was donated to the university in the 1940s and named after H.
The Wills House once held the MSU Department of Meteorology, but extensive renovations costing more than $970,000 took place at the beginning of 2015. Plans for the building included office space for several MSU officials.
Ben Aki, the university’s doctoral student in archeology and anthropology, said in the statement that the discovery gave a look at what the university campus was like at the time.
“In the early days of MSU’s astronomy program, Carpenter would take students to the roof of College Hall and have them observe from there, but he didn’t find that a sufficient solution for the students to gain experience with astronomical observation,” said Ake. “When MSU acquired a telescope, Carpenter successfully lobbied for funding for a place to install it: the first campus observatory.”
Ake said the observatory belonged to a few professors and a few students when the university was called Michigan Agricultural College and the university’s archives and Horace Smith’s book “The Stars Over the Red Cedar” were used to confirm the discovery.
“The Campus Archeology program is designed to protect and mitigate our underground heritage here at MSU,” Stacy Camp, director of CAP and assistant professor of anthropology at MSU, said in the release. “We collaborate with the IPF on construction projects and we are involved in the pre-planning stages to ensure that if they are likely to run into an archaeological site, we can protect it in some way.”
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MSU’s current observatory is located at the intersection of Forest and College Roads.
MSU spokesman Alex Tekepp didn’t immediately know how MSU plans to proceed, but said ground penetrating radar will be used at the site on Aug. 9 to learn more.
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