MSU Discovers Old 1881 Campus Observatory Underground

In the early summer of 2023, construction workers were behind Wills House on the MSU campus digging holes for hammock posts. They didn't get too far when they hit something hard, thinking maybe it was the foundation of an old building.

A call to MSU's Archaeology Program got things rolling to find out what was underground. After studying archival campus maps, they realized what they had dug into was part of MSU's original observatory, built in 1881.

In an article in Smithsonian Magazine, director of the Campus Archaeology Program, Stacey Camp, stated “The original campus observatory was built and used at a time when Michigan Agricultural College—what would become [Michigan State]—was a radically different institution with only a handful of professors and a relatively small student body.”

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The observatory was built by Rolla Carpenter, a campus professor of math, astronomy, French and civil engineering at Michigan State. Unfortunately and sadly, it didn't last very long. Even though it had a classic telescope and held astronomy classes, the whole thing was torn down during the 1920s, approximately 40 years after it was built.

The observatory was constructed after the professor talked the administration into building it. Previously, students could only observe the sky on the roof of College Hall...so it made sense to have their own observatory.

The student archaeologists discovered most of the foundation was intact and it became a dig site for students. According to the Washington Post via the Smithsonian Magazine, Stacey Camp says, “Maybe there’s pencils or pens or other things that students have left behind.....,Maybe there’s parts of a telescope that were left behind. We don’t know until we dig.”