Rosenberg offered to sell the house to Saugus and the DAR, however neither could meet his asking price. Instead he reached an agreement with the Alumni Association of the Henry Ford Trade School, which intended on moving the building to Henry Ford's Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. News of the impending move caused outrage amongst Saugus residents and preservationists who, after extensive discussions, convinced Henry Ford not to acquire the building. In exchange, Ford wanted the Alumni Association reimbursed what it spent on the property. Fundraising efforts in Saugus were disappointing, so William Sumner Appleton, President of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, proposed splitting the cost between the state, town, and the public. When it became clear that this plan would not work, Appleton created a nonprofit, called the First Iron Works Association, to purchase and maintain the property. In 1943 the First Iron Works Association (FIWA) purchased the farmhouse as well as the DAR's piece of the former Iron Works property. Louise E. du Pont Crowninshield, one of the FIWA's directors, approached Quincy Bent, a retired executive of Bethlehem Steel residing in Gloucester, Massachusetts, for money. Although Bent was unimpressed by the house, he was interested in the property's slag pile, which indicated that the site could contain the remains of an iron works. Bent eventually convinced the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) to fund the restoration of the Iron Works. In September 1948, FIWA president J. Sanger Attwill approached archaeologist Roland W. Robbins who had discovered the site of Henry David Thoreau's cabin on Walden Pond about trying to find the site of the Iron Works. Robbins was interested in the idea of digging at a site that was over three hundred years old, the challenge of working on a site where there little information, including no plans or sketches, and the opportunity to work at what may have been the first iron-manufacturing plant in the American colonies. Robbins' excavations uncovered the major manufacturing units of the Iron Works, including the foundations of buildings, remains of the blast furnace, holding ponds, and canal, a 500-pound hammer used in the forge, and a waterwheel that powered the bellows for the blast furnace, along with its wheel pit. The wheel was saved by biologists from Harvard University, who developed a process to preserve it. In total, more than 5,000 artifacts were found. Robbins was aided