Mound Builders
Written by Thomas A. Walton
No. 19.
Ironton Register, Thursday, May 5, 1892
EDITOR REGISTER. – I read your article some time since regarding the find on the Luke Kelly farm and was waiting to hear from your esteemed fellow citizen, Ambrose Jackson Trumbo, for further particulars, but not heard from him, and reading Mr. Carpenter’s letter regarding it, I at once got out my “Notes of the early settlers of Lawrence county, Ohio,” and in it find the following.
“Ante-white man’s time or knowledge on the Austin farm appeared to have been a battleground or a town or both, many years ago. Many large skeletons of humans, bear tusks, buckhorns, and other bones have been found at about three feet depth, and large quantities of bullets have been picked up from the same farm, which had been plowed out.
They were about the size of a musket ball. They have been picked up by the hat full, and G. Trumbo plowed up about a peck of bullets which had been what appeared to have been a linen sack. There appeared to have been a pavement made of broken boulders on this farm. This farm has earthenware, tomahawks, stone pipes, arrows, and stone axes. A white oak two feet in diameter stood on a mound on G. Trumbo’s land.
The mound was dug to make the brick for A. J. Trumbo’s house on it; about three feet in depth was a skeleton; over the skeleton was a stone about 3 ½ feet across and 4 inches in depth; under the stone was a buck or elks horn about 2 ½ inches in diameter, and nearly in the shape of a pick (it is a beautiful stone and had A. J. Trumbo) and a stone pipe.
There appears to have been a battleground opposite here in Kentucky; stone mounds with skeletons are on top of high hills.”
I will say, in addition to the above extracts, that after diligent search and inquiry and talking with many people on the subject, I believe the so-called “mound builders” built mounds over their kings or rulers and over large heaps of dead soldiers, something like is done now where large numbers are slain in a battle.
There were remains of old earthworks and many relics of war in the old sand plain between Paddy creek and the river. I had gathered battle axes, arrowheads, and stones so made as to be used with a wythe on it and many other weapons of warfare. There were hundreds of mounds in this bottom, but the chief one seemed to be the one still standing north of where we lived.
Where Proctorville now stands was one day part of a well-paved city, but I think the greater part is now in the Ohio river. Only a few mounds, there; one of which was near the C. Wilgus mansion and contained a skeleton of a very large person, all double teeth and sound, in a jaw bone that would go over the jaw with the flesh on of a large man; the common burying ground was well filled with skeletons at a depth of about 6 feet. Part of the pavement was of boulder stone and part of well-preserved brick.
In a pamphlet about the size of an almanac, entitled “Notes of early times and people in what is now Ohio,” I found, among other things, something like the following: “In 1764, a French general by the name of General Boquet who was descending the Ohio river with French soldiers and friendly Indians under his command, was met by several tribes of Indians in the big bottom of the Ohio side below what is called Hanging Rock, and they’re a great battle was fought, and the French defeated.”
The above book may be in the Auditor of State’s office. T. A. Walton.
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