Eli Whitney constructed a stone forge here in 1804, the first and largest of the five buildings he built on this side of the Mill River. In it, blacksmiths shaped and welded musket barrels with hammers and anvils and with air pumped into carefully bedded coals, while the building was kept purposefully dark so artisans could judge the temperature of their welds as the steel turned red, then orange, then yellow, and finally white. A sketch in Whitney's papers proposed 6 hearths for the forge. Whitney, his son, and later manufacturers adapted the building for 140 years until vandals set fire to the aging structure in 1950, after which its remaining stonework was plowed back into the soil from which it had been taken. The large dam nearby was built 50 years after Whitney began developing this site, while his armory had earlier relied on modest improvements to a dam that had served grist mills since the 17th century. Whitney built a second dam and millpond to power the forge, and a sketch from his papers shows the south wall with two channels bringing water through the building, though only one was built. Benjamin Silliman reported that Whitney refined the canal feeding the forge in 1820. A Yale archaeological survey in the 1970's uncovered the tail race that returned the water to the Mill River, and Yale Archaeology Methods classes have investigated the foundations and waste pits here since the 1970's, while Mark Wesolowski's Eagle Scout Project helped document the foundation.

Photo: Conrad Ward

Photo: Conrad Ward