West Kentucky's Historical Wonders
Mounds of data unlike any other await you on the Great River Road

Why is it that we never seem to get around to exploring in our own back yards? Though all of my formative years were spent in Western Kentucky, within spitting distance, as my dad used to say, of Wickliffe Mounds, my first visit to these storehouses of archeological treasures came just this past August.

That day the air hung thick with humidity, noontime heat and the cacophony of summer bugs and crickets at Wickliffe, one of a number of small towns along the Great River Road noted for their prehistoric mounds. This particular hamlet overlooks the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, so of course I had to drive across both bridges to touch down in Missouri and then in Illinois, where from the Fort Defiance Park visitors’ tower I watched a tiny tugboat pushing a string of three massive barges in the direction of New Orleans.

Still used today for freight and pleasure boating, rivers were the super highways of old. Long before fur-trading French explorers canoeing its watery miles in search of the mouth of the Mississippi stopped here in 1682, Native Americans depended upon the rivers for transportation and food.

From about 1100 AD to 1350 AD, a culture known as the Mississippians resided at what is now Wickliffe high on a bluff in a village built around a central plaza. Part of a complex society that inhabited the entire Mississippi River Valley from Wisconsin to the Gulf of Mexico, these peaceful farmers tilled fertile river bottom lands and gradually constructed eight or more mounds, imposing hills of earth built to elevate their chief’s house, to provide a platform for ceremonial structures and to bury their dead.

No one knows why these tribal people suddenly vacated such verdant riverside lands. Archaeologists speculate that disease, warfare, environmental changes, depletion of resources or an earthquake may have played a part, but no solid scientific evidence clearly supports any theory. Nevertheless, these Mound Builders made their historic mark.

“The Mississippian culture was the most complex and sophisticated culture north of Mexico before the Europeans arrived, and it’s important to understand there’s that kind of heritage here,” says Dr. Kit Wessler, WMRC director and MSU professor of archaeology. “It’s also a heritage that’s directly ancestral to a lot of the historic tribes whose members are still around, people like the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Cherokee, the Cree and the Quapaw. They certainly feel some emotional ties to the mound sites in the East.”

It was the Chickasaw who originally sold this far western chunk of Kentucky in 1818 to the United States as part of the Jackson Purchase.

Today at Wickliffe Mounds Research Center, a 10-minute video provides background for a self-guided tour of four of the remaining mounds. Three well-maintained exhibit buildings are packed with prehistoric artifacts and a wealth of information about the Mississippian people, mound excavation and the painstaking process involved in an archaeological dig.

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the site became the first Kentucky Archaeological Landmark in 1987. Though early area settlers knew about them, Wickliffe’s mounds first received print publicity in 1888, when Robert Loughridge mapped them for the Kentucky Geological Survey. For three decades the Wisconsin Chair Company lumbered the site.

Then in 1930 crews building Highway 51/60/62 West unearthed copious numbers of pottery and stone tools, catching the attention of Paducah businessman Colonel Fain King. After purchasing the property, he and with his wife Blanche Busey King began excavations and developed the mounds as a tourist attraction called the Ancient Buried City. Unfortunately, their archaeological field notes have disappeared.

Upon retiring in 1946, the Kings deeded the property to Paducah’s Western Baptist Hospital. For the next 37 years, the site lacked curators who understood archaeology or museum procedures, and many visitors left with errant beliefs. Grandparents who visited during that time will bring their grandkids today and ask where the glowing rocks are, says Hildebrand, as the Ancient Buried City had a black light that would illuminate certain rocks and visitors’ teeth.

But in 1983, the hospital donated the mounds to Murray State University (MSU), and the Wickliffe Mounds Research Center (WMRC) was born. At once, academic archaeologists and museum personnel set about studying, interpreting and preserving the grounds, and through 1996, MSU sponsored further excavations, all of which yielded Mississippian remnants. Only fifteen percent of the site has been excavated, and unearthed relics still abound.

“Every time a mole comes up, it yields artifacts,” Wessler laughs. “We can’t get the moles to keep good records, though!”

Though there are no long-term plans for further excavation at this time, the center continues its mission of educating the public on area archaeology and studying and preserving the site, which has drawn folks for well over a century for reasons ranging from archaeological and historical to ancestral ties and plain old curiosity.

“I think the fact that (visitors) can see artifacts and they can see excavations and they can know that what they’re looking at is directly related to the place they’re standing on is certainly a draw,” says Wessler, whose book about the site will be released in October. “You can walk into our exhibit buildings and look at the excavations. This is where the stuff came from. This is where we found it. And as you walk out the door, there’s more under your feet exactly like it.”

Housing one of the most unusual displays, the Cemetery Building shows what archaeologists can glean from burials about infant mortality, life expectancy, disease, injury and diet, and how construction and looting have destroyed valuable artifacts. Arranged in burial position, ten plastic skeletons have replaced the real bones that were removed from the burial pit for study and reburial, a plan that has created controversy with some Mississippian descendants.

“We have no reburial ceremony,” Victoria Fortnoy, a Native American of Shawnee, Scottish and Irish extract, explains in an insightful audio interview, “because when we put them in the ground, we thought that was it!”

“Some of the original bones were interred at a partial inter-tribal ceremony in 1994,” says Carla Hildebrand, assistant director and curator of education at WMRC. “The rest are safely stored on-site. We’ll wait for permission from a Native American group that can legally claim ancestry.

“Cemeteries are sacred no matter what culture you’re from,” she continues. “Many Native Americans visit either to pay their respects or to make sure we’re being respectful.”

While here, all visitors can try their hand at sifting an archaeologist’s screen and learning to use a wooden “pump drill” at a Touch Table in a small museum; investigate a partially-recreated ceremonial structure on a platform mound, a wildflower area, wood walk trail and excavations trail, and participate in hands-on workshops led by primitive lifeways experts.

“We have a lot of opportunities for Native Americans to share their culture with visitors – basket weaving, pottery, crafting bows and moccasin-making, a new joint effort between the Salato Wildlife Education Center and the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife,” says Hildebrand.

Visit the center’s info-loaded Web site at campus.murraystate.edu/org/wmrc/wmrc.htm for the lowdown on the annual spring Native American Woods Walk, where you can learn how to spot and use herbs, the popular Flint Knappers’ Weekend, and Native American Dance Weekend each September, when inter-tribal First Nation performs in full regalia, then discusses their individual tribal traditions.

New in 2001, a Kids Archaeology Day Camp will welcome fifth graders next summer. During WMRC’s regular March to November season, school groups can take guided mounds tours focused on Native American culture, archaeology or the environment.

Saturated with intriguing knowledge on all three, I took my mound-sized appetite to cool, friendly Chris’ Diner, right down Highway 51. From the jukebox “Lonesome” George Jones wailed “High-Tech Redneck” as I devoured an icy glass of sweet tea and a luscious fish sandwich with a tomato so red and ripe the juice ran down my fingers. At Chris’ you can start your morning with quail or pork chops, homemade biscuits, gravy and hash browns, or chow down on trucker-portion daily lunch specials for $3.95.

Residents of Mississippi, the Chickasaw traveled north to hunt their victuals here in the game-rich northwestern area of the Jackson Purchase, now known as the Ballard County Wildlife Management Area, a 8,400-acre hunting, fishing, camping and picnicking paradise. Part of the Mississippi Flyway, a natural migratory path for ducks and geese, the refuge also is nirvana for bird and wildlife spotters.

Two Great Blue Herons rode an updraft in lazy circles way above me and a whitetail deer leapt gingerly into the woods as I crunched down the muddy dirt road to pristine Swan Lake, a 2,100-acre tract with eleven lakes meandering around rich fields of August soybeans and corn that KET’s Dave Shuffet has described as the state’s most beautiful place.

Both he and the Chickasaw had the right idea. Except for the absence of Spanish moss, I could’ve sworn I was on a Louisiana bayou. From a metal observation platform above Swan Lake, I marveled at the stark white reflection of a crane, quiet in its noontime siesta, and at sturdy, sienna-hued cypress trees surrounded by stumps, or “knees,” that looked for all the world like elfin toadstools. The water was so placid that each reflected cloud seemed to scuttle right across its surface.

Take a picnic to this peaceful place, but be sure to pack your insect repellent.

Katherine Tandy Brown is a staff writer for The Lane Report.
editorial@lanereport.com

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