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.”…