Recommendations of the Large Industrial Artifact Advisory Panel

The Large Industrial Artifact Advisory Panel, America's Industrial Heritage Project, National Park Service

They are the man-made dinosaurs of our nation's past, these remnants of the industrial revolution's marvels - the factories, canals, bridges, and railroads that grew continually larger and more complex between the 1750s and the 1950s. In 1987, a grass roots effort to preserve and interpret them was given a focus and a name by the National Park Service: the America's Industrial Heritage Project (AIHP). Centered in southwestern Pennsylvania, the AIHP embraces components that tell the story of transportation, and of the iron, steel, and coal industries in the United States: early roads, canals, and railroads; tunnels and bridges; an inclined plane for transporting sectional canal boats over the Allegheny Mountains; mines and quarries; and factories of all sorts. Also here, and equally essential to the story of life and work in those times, are the houses of the factory workers and owners, together with the businesses, churches, and clubs they patronized. The National Park Service envisions a network of sites, coordinated by locally formed commissions, that will illustrate the advent, rise, consolidation, and decline of these heavy industries. The huge artifacts from industrial sites are notoriously expensive to conserve and store, and highly dependent on context for both maintenance and interpretation. To start planning for the proper treatment of these artifacts, which clearly must be one of the AIHP's fundamental objectives, an advisory panel of 28 specialists - archeologists, historians, museum directors and curators, historical architects, and conservators - was established to develop recommendations. Recommendations of the panel will help determine what should be saved, and how, and will guide the interpretation of this material. Decisions must be made quickly. These industrial sites, largely rooted in the 19th century, were part of an economic infrastructure that is now obsolete, and obsolescence, in economic terms, has transformed the buildings and machinery at these sites into liabilities rather than assets. The AIHP represents an opportunity to preserve fundamental elements of the material culture of an era that produced most of today's social, technological, economic, and political realities. The artifacts directly associated with industrial production - the buildings, machinery, furnishings, graffiti, and documents - as well as the material reflection of the social system - the houses, churches, clubs, union halls, restaurants, and bars - all still exist. If efforts to preserve them are not begun now, however, these invaluable artifacts will be irretrievably lost.