Detroit's Ribbon Farms: Shaping the Future Metropolis

Detail from Aaron Greeley's Map of Private Claims on
Lake St. Clair, the Detroit River and Lake Erie, 1810.
Image sourtesy Seeking Michigan. (Source.)

A distinguishing feature of early Detroit and other French settlements in North America is the way farmland was divided into long, narrow strips commonly referred to as ribbon farms. In Metropolitan Detroit, these farms were established on both sides of the Detroit, Rouge, and Clinton Rivers, as well as on Conner's Creek and the shores of Lake St. Clair. They are found elsewhere in Michigan, in Monroe, Saint Clair, Cheboygan, Mackinac and Chippewa Counties.

Dividing riverfront and lakeshore land in this way had two important advantages. First, it provided access to the water, the primary mode of transportation, to the maximum number of families. Second, it placed each farmhouse at a minimum distance from one another and from the fort at the center of the settlement. Visitors to early Detroit noted that the continuous row of houses along the river created the impression that the settlement was larger than it really was.


Twelve farms of equal area, each containing one house,
divided into ribbon farms (top) and into a simple grid (bottom).
A typical farm in early Detroit contained a house close to the water, and a road between the house and the shore. Orchards of pear, apple and cherry trees were characteristic of the old French farms, grown either in front of or behind the farmhouse. "Almost every farmer had from one to half a dozen" pear trees, wrote historian Silas Farmer. Bela Hubbard in the 1880s described old pear trees that had reached up to eighty feet in height.


This house was built ca. 1835 at the foot of the Labrosse Farm, roughly between
Seventh and Eighth Streets in Detroit. To the right are old French pear trees.
Image courtesy Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library. (Source.)
The main cereal crops grown in the early days were Indian corn, wheat, and oats. Farmers also kept vegetable gardens, raised livestock, and even grew grapes for wine making. Cattle grazed on the farmers' land or on the public land north of the fort. The ribbon farms extended into the dense hardwood forest that surrounded the settlement, but these rear portions of the lots were not cultivated.

Most farms were two or three French arpents wide (1 arpent = 191.831 feet), but some measured five arpents across or more. All farms on the Detroit River were forty arpents deep--about one and a half miles long. The borders between individual farms were marked by ditches.

Houses from Detroit's old "ribbon farms."
1. The Labadie House. Built circa 1780, demolished 1910. (Source.)
2. The Moran House. Built circa 1734, demolished 1886. (Source.)
3. The Lafferty House. Built in 1747, burned or demolished 1861. (Source.)
4. The Hamtramck House. Built 1802, demolished 1898. (Source.)
Images courtesy Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.
Map: Detail from McNiff’s 1796 Plan of the Settlements at Detroit.
Image courtesy Detroit Historical Society. (Source.)

Early Grants

When Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac founded Fort Pontchartrain in 1701, the French Canadian settlers were dependent on trade with Native Americans and supplies from Quebec for food. Although some crops were grown on the public grounds, no farms were granted to white settlers for several years. Cadillac had not yet been authorized to make such concessions, and there was little available land close to the fort, which was flanked on the east and west by Miami and Huron villages, and an Ottawa village farther upstream.


Settlements along the Detroit River, circa 1702.
From south to north: Huron, French, Loups, and Ottawa.
Miamis soon joined the Loups and lived together in the same village.
Image courtesy Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.
(Source.)
Peace among the First Nations gathered at Detroit was tenuous, and the locations of villages shifted after major conflicts. In just a few years, the Miami had moved to Ohio, and the Ottawa relocated across the Detroit River. By 1707, Cadillac had the authority to grant land concessions, and the first farms allotted were east of the fort, on the land left vacant by the Miami and Ottawa.


Plan of Detroit in 1731 by Henri-Louis Deschamps de Boishébert,
probably the earliest depiction of Detroit's ribbon farms.
Image courtesy Wayne State University Press. (Source.)
Researchers have identified the recipients of thirty-one farm grants (PDF) made by Cadillac between 1707-1710. These "grants" came laden with multiple obligations and restrictions. Each owner was required to:

• Pay Cadillac annual dues of five livres
• Pay an annual fee of ten livres for the right to trade
• Refrain from hunting hares, rabbits, partridges or pheasants (other hunting was allowed)
• Grind all grain at Cadillac's mill and pay the associated fees
• Begin improvements on land within three months
• Obtain Cadillac's permission to sell land, and Cadillac had first right to buy
• Provide timber for the stockade or shipbuilding if requested
• Not work as blacksmith, cutler, armorer or brewer without a permit
• Not sell liquor to Native Americans
• Plant a maypole before the door of Cadillac's home each spring (!)

Cadillac was forced to leave Detroit in 1711, having been "promoted" to the office of Governor of Louisiana. Few if any grants were made for twenty years while the colony languished.

French Growth and British Occupation

King Louis XV, eager to see Detroit become self sufficient, pressured its commandants to continue leasing farmland in the 1720s and 1730s. In the relative peace that came with the end of the bloody Fox Wars (1712-1733), additional land grants were made between 1734 and 1736. Farmers began to build houses on their land around this time.

A dispute between the Huron and Ottawa in 1738 led to the Hurons' abandonment of their village west of the fort. The French divided the former Huron settlement into more ribbon farms in the 1740s, expanding the colony downstream until it met the border of the land owned by the Potawatomi, whose village was located at what is now Riverside Park, near the Ambassador Bridge. The Hurons were eventually enticed to return to Detroit, settling across the river from their former village.


Detroit in 1749. (Source.)

France redoubled its efforts to expand the colony in 1749, promising new settlers not just land, but tools, animals and seed. Twenty French Canadian families arrived that year, establishing ribbon farms downstream from the fort on what is now the Canadian shore.

Following the takeover of Detroit by the British in 1760 and Pontiac's unsuccessful siege of the fort three years later, the remaining First Nations at Detroit began to sell and abandon their land. Whites who purchased this land divided it into the same ribbon pattern as the generations before them. It was during this period that Belle Isle was purchased from the Chippewa and Ottawa nations, and Grosse Ile from the Potawatomi. Ribbon farms spread both north along the western shore of Lake St. Clair and up the Clinton River, and south along the Detroit River to Lake Erie, moving inland along the Rouge River and the River Raisin.

The Private Claims

Click here for a larger version of this image.
What happens to private property when a brand new government takes over a 100 year old settlement with poor record keeping? That was the situation the United States government found itself in when Colonel J. F. Hamtramck took command of Detroit on July 11, 1796. Congress directed the creation of a Detroit land office in 1804 in part to register land claims, but there was only enough documentation to support eight titles.

The process was greatly simplified when Congress passed a law on March 3, 1807 ensuring that residents who had "settled, occupied and improved" land in the Detroit district "prior to and on the first day of July, 1796" would have their claim "granted, and such occupant or occupants shall be confirmed in the title to the same." In other words, if you had a house and/or farm on a parcel of land before July 1, 1796, the U.S. Government would recognize your ownership and issue you a deed. (No Native Americans could file claims because the 1795 Treaty of Greenville extinguished all Indian title to land within six miles of the Detroit River and the west end of Lake Erie.)


Ribbon farms along the Rouge and Detroit Rivers in 1817.
Image courtesy Bureau of Land Management. (Source.)
Residents filed their applications at the Detroit land office and brought forth witnesses--usually neighbors--who corroborated their claims. Petitions were numbered in the order in which they were received, and the land was surveyed at the government's expense. When an application was approved, the property owner received a land patent. These were originally issued by the Treasury Department, then later by the General Land Office and signed by the President of the United States (at least until the 1830s). The application number was then designated as that parcel's Private Claim Number. Every ribbon farm has a Private Claim Number.

For example, the very first application processed by the Detroit land office was that of Elijah Brush, who happened to claim ownership of the first ribbon farm east of the fort. Upon approval, the Brush Farm was designated "Private Claim No. 1," and Mr. Brush was issued a land patent by the United States Treasury Department.


Private Claims on the Clinton River in what is now Harrison Township.
The numbers designate each parcel's Private Claim Number.
Detail from Aaron Greeley's Map of Private Claims on
Lake St. Clair, the Detroit River and Lake Erie, 1810.
Image sourtesy Seeking Michigan. (Source.)

Although the original French grants only extended inland by 40 arpents (about one and a half miles), a modern map of the Private Claims in Detroit shows them being twice that length. The reason for this is that the farmers on the U.S. side of the Detroit River petitioned Congress in 1807, pleading for extensions to their claims. They argued that these forested back lots were their only source of wood for fuel and for the construction of fences and buildings. Congress passed a law in 1812 allowing these landowners to claim a full 80 arpents in depth, as long as the land behind their original 40 arpents was unoccupied and unclaimed. The Private Claims recognized today extend almost three miles inland, but the French Canadian farmers of eighteenth century Detroit never occupied lots of this size.

Subdivisions

Detroit enjoyed a rapid expansion following the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, enticing the owners of the ribbon farms to turn their land over to urbanization. Former fields, orchards and meadows were subdivided into building lots, streets and alleys. Augustus Woodward's famous street plan was abandoned before any of the ribbon farms were incorporated into the city. A simpler plan of rectangular city blocks aligned with Woodward and Jefferson Avenues was followed for a time on the city's near west side, and portions of some ribbon farms were subdivided in accordance with it. This gridiron pattern disregarded the boundaries of the ribbon farms, resulting in a multitude of fractional lots. This system was also dropped, and farms were then subdivided on an individual basis. From then on, the boundaries of streets and building lots would conform to the outlines and positions of the old French land claims.


Ribbon farms dictated the orientation of most of Detroit's streets within three
miles of the river. Borders of the farms are highlighted in yellow. The base map
is from 1872, long before urban renewal destroyed the street grid. (Source).
A farm owner who wanted to subdivide their land was required to submit to the county a plat indicating the outlines and dimensions of lots, streets and alleys. When approved, streets and alleys became public property, and the proprietor was the owner of the individual lots, which could be sold as they saw fit. Farmers near Detroit tended to subdivide their land in sections rather than all at once.

Left: Subdivision plat of part of the Woodbridge Farm in Corktown, 1858. Blocks are aligned with the "Woodward Gridiron" rather than the farm's borders. The area between Howard and Labrosse Streets was still an orchard and not yet divided into lots. (Source.)
Right: Subdivision plat of part of the Van Dyke Farm in West Village, 1890, in line with the farm's borders. Florene Street has since been renamed St. Paul Street. (Source.)

Private Claims in the suburbs were subdivided well into the 20th century, as the following two examples show.

Left: River Bend Subdivision No. 1 (1999), part of Private Claim No. 207 in Harrison Township. (Source.)
Right: Edward Rose Subdivision (1952), part of Private Claim No. 656 in St. Clair Shores. (Source.)

Disparity among the widths of Detroit's ribbon farms created a lack of uniformity in the city's street grid. The French grants normally ranged anywhere from two to five arpents wide, resulting in irregular city blocks when developed. The image below shows an example on Detroit's east side. The lower half is from a 1796 map, indicating the widths of farms in arpents above each owners' name. The upper half is a modern map of the adjacent area. Ribbon farm borders are highlighted in yellow.


Old map: Detail from McNiff’s 1796 Plan of the Settlements at Detroit.
Image courtesy Detroit Historical Society. (Source.)
As with Native American trails, the French ribbon farms have imprinted the landscape in ways that survive long after their makers have left. The history they have made here is still very much alive and with us today.


* * * * *

Click and hold the white divider in the images below and slide left and right to compare old maps with satellite views and to see how ribbon farms influenced urbanization and suburban sprawl in Metro Detroit.


Private Claims in what is now Grosse Pointe Woods and Grosse Pointe Shores.
Old map: detail from J. Fletcher's 1817 survey of township I south range XII east.


The rear border of Private Claims No. 317 & 318, ribbon farms on the Rouge
River, create this anomaly on the Detroit-Dearborn border, shown here in red.
Old map: detail from J. Fletcher's 1817 survey of township II south range X east.


Ribbon farms in what is now St. Clair Shores.
Old map: detail from an 1875 atlas of Macomb County. (Source.)


The City of Harper Woods lies on the extensions of ribbon farms on Lake St. Clair.
Old map: detail from an 1876 atlas of Wayne County. (Source.)

Retracing Detroit's Native American Trails

The most fascinating thing to me about Native American trails isn't just that Detroit was a hub in a continent-wide network of footpaths worn into the earth centuries before Cadillac or Columbus--it's that some of these paths have been preserved as modern roads and highways, and today we can still walk in the footsteps of the civilizations that came before us.


From Archaeological Atlas of Michigan, but Wilbert B. Hinsdale. (Source.)
I first learned about this on a childhood visit to my grandparents' house in Clinton Township. There was a historical marker a few blocks from their subdivision, and I asked my grandpa what it said. He told me that it said Moravian Road, where it was located, was originally a trail cut through the wilderness by Delaware Indians to connect their Moravian village to Detroit.


The historical marker at Moravian Road and Metropolitan Parkway.
Image courtesy waymarking.com. (Source.)

The Moravian Trail is young, being "only" 330 years old. The establishment of Fort Pontchartrain in 1701 likely influenced the locations of some older trails, but many certainly existed since the time when the Mound Builders lived in southwest Detroit more than a millennium ago.


From Michigan Highways: From Indian Trails to Expressways, by Philip P. Mason. (Source.)
These trails were narrow, single-file passageways simply created by the earth being trampled along the paths most frequently traveled. But in a way, it was the land itself that created these highways. The Earth predetermines where humans will settle (on arable land, close to waterways convenient for transportation) and the most logical path between those settlements (high, dry, level land, avoiding swamps and other obstacles, and crossing rivers at their most narrow or shallow points). Some trails in Michigan trace glacial moraines deposited ten thousand years ago. Archaeologists hypothesize that roaming herds of animals were the first to travel these paths, showing the way to the hunters who followed them. When the Europeans came, they found that the best places to settle were the sites of former Native American villages, and they utilized and maintained the same trails between them.


From Archaeological Atlas of Michigan, but Wilbert B. Hinsdale. (Source.)
You have probably already heard about roads that used to be "Indian paths." This isn't a new revelation. The question I'm interested is, How do we know that a certain road was once a Native American trail?

One source is the accounts of early settlers. The Pioneer Society of the State of Michigan was founded in 1876, the year of the United States' first centennial, to preserve the memories of the first white settlers of the state's interior before that generation had completely disappeared. They described seeking out and relying on the trails for their own needs, and later expanding them into wagon trails and roads.

But we have even better proof.

The U.S. Government Surveys

Following the 1807 Treaty of Detroit, all land in southeast Michigan that had not been settled upon before 1796 or designated an Indian reservation became property of the United States Government. In order for the land to be sold or used as payment, it needed to be surveyed. The first surveyors in southeast Michigan divided the land into six-mile by six-mile townships. At a later date these townships were subdivided into one-mile square sections. While imposing this massive grid onto the landscape, driving posts into the ground every half mile along their paths, surveyors had been instructed to note, among other observations: the condition of the soil and land; the type of timber or other growth; the boundaries of rivers, lakes and other bodies of water; and the locations of "all roads and trails, with the courses they bear." In theory, the surveyors' field notes should contain this data.

Take for example Farmington township, subdivided by Samuel Carpenter. His field notes show that he set a marker (probably a cedar post) at what is now the intersection of Farmington Road and Nine Mile Road on May 11, 1817. The post is long gone, but its exact location has been continuously preserved for nearly 200 years. Today, a modern surveyors' mark is on this very spot, protected by a cast iron cover:


A survey marker in the intersection of Farmington and Nine Mile Roads.
Image courtesy Google Street View.
The following day, Carpenter ran a line north from this point, carefully measuring the land with a sixty-six foot surveyor's chain. Below are the notes he took while running this line:


Image courtesy Seeking Michigan. (Source.)
We can see in the highlighted text that at 68 chains, 34 links (4,510.44 feet) north from the Farmington/9 Mile marker, Carpenter noted an Indian path. This is that spot today:




This is Shiawassee Street, once part of the Shiawassee Trail. Google Earth places the point 4,510.44 feet north of Carpenter's survey marker inside of the First Baptist Church, but this road was clearly a continuation of the old trail. Carpenter repeatedly crossed over this trail in his survey, but you don't need to read through his field notes to decode its path. The surveyors themselves drew up plats of the townships they subdivided. Below is Carpenter's plat of this township, years before it contained a single white settler:


Plat of Township I North, Range IX East of the Meridian, Michigan Territory.
The faint red line running diagonally is a Native American trail.
Image courtesy Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office. (Source.)
The survey plats often indicated trails with a red line.


The Shiawassee Trail in Farmington, now Shiawassee Street.
Sometimes the trails were labeled.


The Saginaw Trail in Independence Township, now Dixie Highway.
Usually paths were only indicated by a dotted line paired with a solid line, and only where they intersected the surveyor's grid.


Pieces of the Great Sauk Trail in Canton Township, now Michigan Avenue.
We know exactly where many Native American trails were because their locations were carefully measured in relation to markers that still exist, by eyewitnesses who were trained surveyors, years before any of the land was purchased, developed, or inhabited by white settlers. Because the grid drawn by the surveyors persists--it is what our "mile road" system is based on--it is possible to superimpose the surveyors' plats over a modern map of Metropolitan Detroit and retrace the old trails with great accuracy. Here is a composite of all fifty-eight plats that comprise the tri-county area with trails highlighted in red. Near the bottom is the military road to Urbana, Ohio, denoted in the surveys, highlighted in blue.


This image isn't quite ready to trace onto a modern map. There are some obvious gaps in the trails. Why are most of Macomb and Wayne Counties devoid of any paths? To find the answer, I looked into who was doing the surveying. All of the townships that comprise the tri-county area were subdivided by five surveyors (and their crews): Samuel Carpenter, Joseph Fletcher, Joseph Francis, William Preston, and Joseph Wampler. Below is a map showing who subdivided which township. Townships that did not indicate any Native American trails on their plats or in their field notes are marked with an "X." Do you notice any patterns?


Surveys of Wayne, Oakland and Macomb Counties, 1815-1823.
Isn't it strange that four out of five townships surveyed by Carpenter and Wampler contain trails, while Fletcher, Francis and Preston show a combined total of zero? Maybe these men misunderstood their instructions. Negligence might also have played a role. Fletcher was originally contracted to survey an area close to the Points of Origin for the Michigan Survey, but his work was so flawed that it had to be redone by Wampler. Unfortunately, Fletcher's surveys included all of the modern City of Detroit. We may never accurately know the locations of the Native American trails in the city.

The Orange Risdon Map

In the 1820s, Michigan was on the verge of a massive influx of both homesteaders and speculators seeking cheap land. The southeast part of the territory had been surveyed and was up for sale. Orange Risdon, himself a professional surveyor and well-traveled explorer of the area, tried to capitalize on the mass immigration by producing a detailed map of the region. He utilized government surveys and his own firsthand knowledge to create a map that would help land purchasers make informed selections.


Map of the surveyed part of the territory of Michigan, by Orange Risdon. (Source.)
Risdon published an advertisement in the October 1, 1824 edition of the Detroit Gazette in order to gain early subscribers of the map, which would be published the following year. In the ad, Risdon stated:

"The publisher, having spent some time in exploring that junction of the territory embraced in his map, will be enabled to locate the most important Indian paths, which as they were made by those who were acquainted with every part of the country will be an important guide in the future location of our roads."

Risdon's map uses dotted lines to indicate Native American trails, including the portion of the Shiawassee Trail missing from Fletcher's surveys. Some trails had already been replaced by straight, surveyed roads by the time the map was produced, but enough remained to fill some of the surveyors' omissions.


Detail from Map of the surveyed part of the territory of Michigan. (Source.)
Near Bucklin (modern Dearborn) is the St. Joseph Trail.
Leading northwest out of Detroit is the Shiawassee Trail.
Below is an image that superimposes the trails seen on both Risdon's map and the U.S. surveys onto a modern map of Wayne, Oakland and Macomb Counties.


The Native American trails of Metropolitan Detroit.
Click here for a larger version of this map.

Important Trails Around Detroit

The Saginaw Trail • Ran northwest out of Detroit to the Saginaw River. The site of the settlement at Pontiac was chosen because it was where this trail crossed the Clinton River. North of Pontiac, the Saginaw Trail is mostly preserved as the Dixie Highway. But the winding footpath between Detroit and Pontiac was supplanted by the straight and rigid Woodward Avenue in the 1820s. Even this incarnation of Woodward is not quite the same as today's route. There used to be an abrupt jog in the road in Royal Oak to avoid a swamp. The road turned right at what is now Lafayette Avenue, which used to continue to what is now Crooks Road, where it turned left, then continued to Pontiac. I believe that a portion of Lafayette Avenue traces the old Saginaw Trail, which was bypassing the same swamp. Below is an animation showing this road in the 1817 government survey, an 1872 map, and a modern satellite image.


The Great Sauk Trail • Also called the Chicago Road. It ran west from the Rouge River near Detroit, terminated at Rock Island, Illinois on the Mississippi River. In the 1820s, the trail was used as the foundation of a military road to Fort Dearborn at what is now Chicago. This road exists today as US-12.

The St. Joseph Trail • Also called Territorial Road. It connected the Rouge River near Detroit to the St. Joseph River of Lake Michigan, passing through Jackson, Battle Creek and Kalamazoo. The highway that coincided with the trail was originally marked as US-12 before that designation was transferred to the Chicago Road in 1962.

The Shiawassee Trail • Began just west of Detroit according to Risdon's map, ran northwest and connected to the Shiawassee River at the present site of the Village of Byron. It then followed the Shiawassee River downstream to the Saginaw River. The site of Farmington was chosen by its founder Arthur Power because it was where the Shiawassee Trail crossed the Rouge River.

The Moravian Trail • Cleared of timber in the winter of 1785-86 by Delaware (Lenape) Indians who were members of the Moravian Missionary on the Clinton River. The trail ran southwest from the mission along the Clinton River likely where Moravian Road is today. It continued south through what is now Warren, then took a slightly southeasterly course to Connor's Creek on Detroit's east side. The Fort Gratiot Turnpike later replaced the trail as the northeasterly road out of Detroit.

(There are other roads I haven't mentioned which, even though they appear on Hinsdale's map at the beginning of this entry, may not actually be native American in origin. These will be discussed in a future post.)


Detail from Patrick McNiff's Plan of the Settlements at Detroit, 1796. The Moravian Trail ended at Conner's (formerly Trombley's) Creek close to the Detroit River.
Image courtesy Detroit Historical Society. (Source.)

Native American trails near Detroit in 1797.
Detail from A Rough Sketch of Part of Wayne County Territory by Robert King.
Source: Brian L. Dunnigan, Frontier Metropolis: Picturing Early Detroit, 1701-1838.
Our map was not a blank canvas when Cadillac landed in 1701. Sometimes we assume that the tribes pushed out of southeast Michigan left without a trace, even as we drive along the pathways they built, unaware of their origin. The land was worked and shaped by those who had preceded us since time immemorial, and the Earth bears witness to this fact.

Other Mounds in Metro Detroit

Although I have yet to discuss "urbanism," I'd like to write a little more about other Native American earthworks once located in Metropolitan Detroit. There were too many to fit into in my last entry, but their stories are an important part of our history.

* * * * *

Hinsdale's Atlas

The first attempt to document all known Native American archaeological sites in the state was Wilbert Hinsdale's Archaeological Atlas of the State of Michigan in 1931. Accepted informants ranged from historical documents to "hearsay sources." Hinsdale and his collaborators examined claims and visited sites to determine plausibility, and concluded that there had been more than 1,068 mounds and 113 earthworks in Michigan, but that fewer than 5% "have escaped mutilation." Outside of Detroit, the largest earthworks in the state were found in Grand Rapids and Port Huron.

The following sites in Metropolitan Detroit were included in Hinsdale's atlas:

• Wayne county--In addition to the Springwells Mound Group covered in my last post, Hinsdale showed a mound by the Detroit River east of downtown. I have not found any information on it.
• Oakland County--Hinsdale counted five mounds, including "a group in Groveland Township, near the center, and another in the eastern half of Orion Township. The exact number in either group is not a matter of record." A 1960s subdivision in Bloomfield Township contains streets named Indian Mound Road and Indian Mound Trail, but no such features appear near this location on Hinsdale's map.
• Macomb County--Here there were once twenty-six mounds, eight circular enclosures, and one rectangular enclosure. According to Hinsdale, "All we know of the extensive inclosures [sic] that had been built in unusual designs in Macomb County is gathered from the literature." In other words, they had all been destroyed.

From Archaeological Atlas of Michigan, by Wilbert Hinsdale. (Source.)
Some of the following mounds and earthworks appear in Hinsdale's atlas, others do not.

The Prairie Mound and Mound Road, Detroit

In the mid-19th century, Hamtramck was a large and mostly undeveloped township with borders extending from Woodward Avenue to Connor's Creek, and from the Detroit River to Eight Mile Road. Around 1865, Civil War veteran Philetus W. Norris purchased a large tract of land in the township close to a sandy hill he called the Prairie Mound. An 1876 history of Wayne County described the location:

"The low but fertile glades and blue joint prairies...were alike the chosen hunting grounds of the prehistoric Mound Builders and Indians... The famous Prairie Mound, of some four acres, was ever a chosen haunt for the Indians, trappers and herders; the site of countless broils and revels, and probably the torturing of prisoners--certainly a bone tumulus of the unknown dead."

Norris convinced the Detroit & Bay City Rail Road to come through his property in order to help establish a village there. He wanted to call his settlement "Prairie Mound," but the railroad named their stop "Norris," and the subsequent village plat and post office bore the same name. The original plat contained a Prairie Street and Mound Street, but they have since been renamed Iowa and Davison Streets, respectively. However, the north-south road on the western border of the village was named Mound Avenue. It coincides with today's Mound Road.

The Prairie Mound would have stood northeast of the intersection of Mound and Seven Mile Roads. It appears on this 1876 "bird's eye view" of Norris:


From Illustrated Historical Atlas of the County of Wayne, Michigan, H. Belden & Co.
Image courtesy University of Michigan. (Source.)
In 1873, Philetus Norris incorporated the Prairie Mound Plank Road Company and was authorized to build this toll road to Warren. To trace the path of the Prairie Mound Plank Road today, begin at the intersection of Nevada St. and Mt. Elliott St. and head north; turn east on 7 Mile Rd., north on Sherwood St., west on 11 Mile Rd., and north on today's Mound Rd. to Chicago Rd., the historic center of the Village of Warren. Today's Mound Road runs from Caniff Ave. in Detroit to Auburn Rd. in Shelby Township, and coincides with the former "Mound Avenue" in Norris and the northern segment of the Prairie Mound Plank Road.


The routes of Mound Ave. and Prairie Mound Plank Rd., circa 1876.
The Prairie Mound was probably not a human-made burial mound. In his 1913 Geological Report on Wayne County, William H. Sherzer wrote:

"The so-called 'Prairie Mound' (in) Hamtramck township, is simply a crescent-shaped sand dune, some 9 to 10 feet high and about 500 feet in length. Upon this William A. Ennis built a house and barn about the year 1865 and came across bones associated with Indian relics,--but whether of the Mound Builder type or not is not known."

Whatever the nature of this mound, there is no trace of it left. Standing at approximately this location today is Lou's Coney Island at 19100 Mound Road, Detroit.

Tucker Farm Earthwork, Harrison Township

William Tucker was eleven years old in 1753 when a band of Chippewas raided his family's settlement in Stover, Virginia and killed his father. The Chippewas kidnapped Tucker and his brother, adopted them as members of the tribe, and brought them to their homeland in what is now Clinton and Harrison Townships. When Tucker was allowed to leave the tribe at the age of eighteen, he traveled to Detroit and used his knowledge of Native American dialects to work as a guide and interpreter for Detroit merchants, the British government, and Native American tribes. Twenty years later, in 1780, the Chippewas rewarded Tucker for his friendship and honesty in business with a large land grant on the north side of the Clinton River. He built a log cabin on this land in 1784. The home has since been extensively modified, receiving a brick facade in the 20th century. But the log cabin remains hidden beneath, and appears to be the oldest surviving house built in Michigan outside of Mackinac Island.


The William Tucker House, 29020 Riverbank Street, Harrison Township.
This home became a Michigan State Historic Site on February 23, 1981.
Having been raised by the Chippewa on this land, Tucker knew the area well. The fruitful hunting grounds and the fertile soil made it an ideal place to homestead. In fact, the site Tucker selected had already been an old Native American settlement. He built his cabin next to an old circular earthwork similar to the one found in Springwells. Previous inhabitants of the area had grown maize on the same spot.


The site of Tucker's cabin and the now-lost "fort." (Source.)
Samuel Brown's The Western Gazetteer; Or Emigrant's Directory, published in 1817, noted the existence of the Tucker Farm Earthwork, and Michael A. Leeson's History of Macomb County, Michigan, written in 1882, claimed that there were other such "forts" along the river on land owned by members of the Tucker family. Archaeologist Arnold Pilling, in researching this location (PDF), noted that the earthwork was still visible in an aerial photograph taken in 1940. But by the end of the decade, the entire area had been built over with riverfront cottages.

Northern Macomb County Earthworks

The largest of the circular earthworks of Macomb County was located on a branch of the Clinton River in Armada Township. It encompassed three acres and stood four or five feet high when described around 1830. It was surrounded by a dry moat created by the digging up of the earth for the embankment. A pond lay within the earthwork. According to Leeson's History of Macomb County, south of this "fort" were many small burial mounds, each containing the remains of one individual. On the other side of a nearby stream was a large burial mound, out of which grew a large oak, surrounded by a series of smaller mounds. Not far from this area were found scattered mounds made entirely of stone piled four feet high, each concealing the cremated remains of one individual. All of these earthworks were destroyed prior to 1882.


From Memorials of a Half-Century by Bela Hubbard.
Farther upstream was a smaller circular earthwork with its own set of burial mounds. Edwin P. Sandford of Romeo dug into one of them in 1880 and extracted the skeletons of three adults and three children. Set apart from the smaller mounds was a larger one four and a half feet high with a diameter of twenty feet. A large oak tree grew from this mound which, when cut down, was found to have been 240 years old. When described in 1882, the mound had not yet been greatly disturbed thanks to the massive roots left behind by the felled oak.

New Gnaddenhütten, Clinton Township

In 1781, a group of Christian missionaries from Ohio were arrested and brought to British-controlled Detroit to answer charges of supporting the American Revolution. These were the Moravians, a group of whites and Delaware Indians practicing a form of Protestantism that predated Martin Luther and had been revived by Count Zinzendorf of Moravia several decades before. While some Moravian leaders were in Detroit, the congregants left behind in Ohio were horrifically massacred by American militiamen. Although the Moravians in Detroit were exonerated of the charges of treason, they feared returning to Ohio. With the help of Chippewa Indians and Fort Detroit's commandant, Major Arent DePeyster, they found a new home on the Clinton River, half a mile west of what is today Mount Clemens. They arrived at the site of their future village on July 22, 1782, and named it New Gnaddenhütten.


New Gnaddenhütten was founded close to this spot on the Clinton River.
Brown referenced this location in his Western Gazetteer:

On the river Huron [the old name for the Clinton River], thirty miles from Detroit, and about eight miles from lake St. Clair, are a number of small mounds, situated on a dry plain, or bluff near the river. Sixteen baskets full of human bones, of a remarkable size, were discovered in the earth while sinking a cellar on this plain, for the missionary.

Strangely, the diary of David Zeisberger, the Moravians' minister, did not mention any mounds. But he did write that his group "found many traces that a long time ago an Indian town must have stood on this place," including "little hills where corn had been planted, but where now is a dense wood of trees two to six feet in diameter." Perhaps these "little hills" were exaggerated into "mounds" in the twenty years between Zeisberger's landing and Brown's research.


The Moravians' village was near the south bank of this bend in the Clinton River.
Also absent from Zeisberger's diary is an account of unearthing a large number of bones. Archaeologist Arnold Pilling has speculated that the Moravians very well could have encountered a mass burial since it was the site of an ancient village, but no cellar was dug for the mission. Instead, the cellar in question may have been one of the "out cellars" mentioned by the Moravians when describing improvements made to the land several years later (see "Six Archaeological Sites in the Detroit Area," Michigan Archaeologist, vol. 7, Sep. 1961).

Riviere au Vase, Chesterfield Township

Bernard Trinity's Many Yesterdays, published in 1986, recounts the stories told by those who grew up in Macomb County in the early 20th century. A Mrs. Mary Quine recalled attending the Green School, a one-room schoolhouse on Sugarbush Road in Chesterfield Township. "What she remembered especially well about the Green School," wrote Trinity, "was the Indian cemetery that was located on the sandy knoll in back of the school. At noontime school children often gathered on the sandy knoll to play or dig for Indian treasures. Marie frequently joined them." A Mrs. Hazel Stevens recounted the story of Martin Green, who lived across from the school, frequently unearthing skulls in his field and placing them on his fence. After the fence pickets accumulated dozens of skulls, a neighborhood meeting was called to ask Green to remove them. Green stored the bones in his attic, Trinity wrote, but "whatever happened to Mr. Green's collection of skulls and human bones was never explained by the members of Green's family or neighbors." These incidents have been corroborated by other longtime residents of the area, according to Chesterfield historian Alan Naldrett.


The site of the sandy knoll on an 1818 government survey of Chesterfield Township.
The Chippewa held the land as a reservation per the 1807 Treaty of Detroit.
It and other local reservations were ceded to the U.S. in 1836 when they
were traded for a thirteen square mile reservation west of the Mississippi River.
Whether the sand ridge behind the Green School was a natural formation or was partly human-made isn't known, but it had clearly once served as a significant Native American burial ground. Residents reported that part of the sandy knoll was removed for commercial purposes in 1927, upon which more skeletons were uncovered. This sand ridge, located on the south bank of the Riviere au Vase (now called Auvase Creek), was excavated in the summers of 1936 and 1937 by Professors Emerson Greenman and George Quimby of the University of Michigan. Remains from at least 350 individuals were removed. Samples taken from the site have been radiocarbon dated to between 900 and 1200 A.D.


From Late Woodland Cultures of Southeastern Michigan by James E. Fitting.
Image courtesy Alan Naldrett.
In his 1965 report on the 1936-1937 excavations, archaeologist James Fitting decries the poor quality of the record keeping associated with the digs and the subsequent site destruction. "After the University of Michigan excavations," he wrote, "the site was subject to much indiscriminant collecting. Many burials and features were destroyed and artifacts removed with no record of provenience. Only one other excavation was undertaken in a controlled manner and adequately reported. This was done by Mr. Jerry DeVisscher" in 1957.

One and a half miles to the northeast of this location, on the southwest bank of the Salt River, was a circular earthwork enclosure with an entrance facing the river. A white oak tree whose truck had a diameter of three feet grew in the middle of it as of 1837. I have not found any reference to this outside of Leeson's History of Macomb County and Robert F. Eldredge's Past and Present of Macomb County, Michigan.

Undisclosed Location, Southeast Michigan

We drove slowly along the dirt road, trying to spot something, anything through the forest. Even with the summer foliage gone, we couldn't make out any unusual mounds or hills.

But this was the right place. Hidden among the trees was, I believe, a circular earthwork--an "Indian fort"--similar to the one that used to lie in Springwells. The similarity between a 19th century eyewitness description and a shape faintly visible on a 20th century aerial photograph on that very spot couldn't be a coincidence.

Signs were posted nearly every ten feet around the property: "No Trespassing / No Hunting" -- "No Trespassing / Violators Will be Prosecuted" -- and a few weathered scraps of wood with hand-painted lettering: "NO TREZ." Maybe sneaking into the forest was a bad idea. We decided to park the car on the public road and walk up the long, muddy, pothole-filled driveway to speak directly to the property's residents. They will appreciate the direct, honest approach.

A dog chained to the front porch of the careworn house barked when we approached. I waved to a man I saw walking from the house to a pickup truck, but the Unsmiling Man did not wave back. He started his vehicle and drove towards us, and we waited for him rather than approach any farther. The silhouette of a second man appeared in the doorway.

The Unsmiling Man stopped his truck next to me with his window down. "Hi," I said, "I am a ... researcher of history." (Yes, that will do...) "I came across some historical records of an old Indian fort located on this land. The--"

"No." The Unsmiling Man was oddly unphased that someone had just walked up to his house talking about an Indian fort. Then, in a tone that was neither rude nor polite, yet unambiguously demarcated The End of the Conversation, he added, "Stay out of the woods."

The direct, honest approach did not work that day. All that was left to do was turn around and walk back down the long, swampy driveway, with the Unsmiling Man's truck following us all the day down to the road. We did not park near the driveway, but a short walk down the road. As we approached our car, a different pickup truck passed us from behind, turned around where our vehicle was parked, and then drove past us again. Was this the shadowy figure we had seen on the porch, protecting the non-existent Indian fort that isn't in the woods that we definitely shouldn't go into?

Although I was disappointed to have missed out on the chance to commune with the past amid the ruins of a lost civilization, let's face it--these events are essentially confirmation that prehistoric earthworks are very much intact right here in Metropolitan Detroit. And I am happy to see that they are hard to find, well hidden, and well protected.

Wait, should I just have bribed him instead?

The Mound Builders

This is the first post of my new blog, Detroit Urbanism. This site is for people who feel compelled to understand why the human-built environment in which we live our lives in and around Detroit is the way it is. These posts will be about the ways history shapes our street grid, municipal boundaries, place names, maps, and architecture. These are the marks the past leaves upon our landscape, and this blog is my attempt to understand how and why. Let me start at the beginning...

* * * * *
What is the oldest human-made structure in Detroit? Many people would say it's the Charles Trowbridge Residence, or possibly the James Smith Log House. But couldn't you say it's the burial mound located on the grounds of Detroit's Historic Fort Wayne? Human remains more than one thousand years old were removed from the mound in the 1940s. But this earthwork of sand and topsoil may not fully be what it appears.


The Fort Wayne Mound.
Photo courtesy Timothy Boscarino, City of Detroit Legislative Policy Division.
The oldest burials at this site date to the Late Woodland Period. It was originally constructed at a time when the Hopewell civilization of the American Midwest was rapidly increasing in size. People were turning away from nomadism and toward a way of living centered around farms and cities. The most prominent urban center of this civilization was the city of Cahokia, located east of what is now St. Louis. In the 13th century, Cahokia reached a population as high as 40,000--larger than the city of London at the time.

The monument at Fort Wayne was not alone. Before the 19th century, it was only one of several burial mounds built on a large sand hill that used to lie just north of the confluence of the Detroit and Rouge Rivers. The hill was about 300 yards wide, nearly three quarters of a mile long, and rose twenty-five feet above the shore. The French called this area "Belle Fontaine" because of the abundant freshwater springs that gushed from the side of the hill. The British called it "Spring Wells". The name was retained by the Americans when the area was incorporated as Springwells Township in 1818.

At least three burial mounds were built on the sand hill at Springwells. Farthest to the southwest was the Fort Wayne mound. On the northeast end was the Copper Works Mound, so called because it was adjacent to a copper smelting operation. In between the two was the Central Mound. Northwest of the great sand hill was Carstens' Mound, also called the Circular Mound. Southwest of the sand hill was a mysterious circular enclosure called the Springwells Earthwork. Near the north bank of the Rouge River, about one half mile from the shore of the Detroit River, was the Great Mound of the River Rouge.


The Springwells Mound Group.
It was well known to the early French settlers that the sand hill at Springwells was a burial ground. Although the mounds were started by a lost civilization distinct from any culture known to early Detroiters, tribal nations in the early nineteenth century adapted the site to their own burial customs. Benjamin Whitherell, who came to Detroit in 1808, recalled:

In my childhood I have seen the children of the wilderness deposit the remains of their departed friends in [the hill's] bosom. They scooped out a shallow grave in the center of the top of the mound, and covered the body with some sand, brought from the neighboring sand-bank....

At different times the Sacs, Sioux, Foxes, Winnebagoes, Menominees, Iowas, Wyandottes, Pottawattomies, Chippewas, Tawas, and other tribes, congregated at this favorite spot, and made the night hideous with discordant yells. Here they held their war and medicine dances, and all sort of wabe-nos. Their music was the monotonous sound of the rude drum, beaten with unvarying stroke, for many hours together, frequently all the night long. It was done to drive the evil spirit off, and sometimes indicated that a warrior was laid in his grave....

The Sand Hill Mounds

Whitherell described the three mounds on the sand hill as being roughly the same size: about ten feet tall and thirty feet in diameter. He estimated the Fort Wayne Mound to be the oldest, as it was covered with large oak trees in his his earliest memories. The Central Mound was covered with smaller oaks. The Copper Works Mound, however "was of a more recent date, and on it was neither tree nor shrub."


The sand hill at Springwells.
From a map of Springwells Township by J. N. Macomb and W. H. Warner, 1841.
Image courtesy Commonwealth Cultural Resources Group, Inc.
These mounds were being pillaged at least as early as 1817. That year, Samuel Brown published The Western Gazetteer; Or Emigrant's Directory, in which he stated that one of the mounds had been partially excavated, and that "bones, stone-axes, arrow-heads &c. were found in abundance." Thomas McKenney, the U.S. Superintendent of Indian Affairs, came to Detroit and visited the mounds on June 19, 1826. The monuments were rapidly deteriorating even then:

There appears to have been three of them, but only one retains much of its original conical figure, and this, like the other two, is fast finding its level. A principal cause of the mounds wasting away, is, the cattle go upon them to get into the cooler, fresher air, which blows upon them from the river, near the shore of which they are--and to get rid of the flies. The soil being light and sandy, is kept stirred by them, and the rains wash it off. Hence the exposure of human bones from time to time, as the several layers, or strata, are reached; for they appear to have been buried at different depths, and upon one another. I picked up some ribs, a bit of an os frontis, a piece of vertebrae, but all in a state of decay, so much so, that they crumbled at the touch.

John T. Blois, in his Gazetteer of the State of Michigan, documented his excavation of the Central Mound in the spring of 1837. He reported that the mound was eight feet high, and its surface contained fragments of pottery, bone and teeth. Two and a half feet below the surface he found six skeletons buried among arrowheads, stone axes, and other implements. Closer to the base of the mound he unearthed six additional skeletons, all buried in kneeling postures, facing north, and each holding a large clay vessel. Among burials were found tools and jewelry made from stone, quartz, animal bones, and sea shells.


A diorama of a burial mound in Ohio. (Source.)
Naturalist and historian Bela Hubbard, who came to Detroit in 1835 at the age of twenty-one, wrote in Memorials of Half a Century that one of the mounds (probably the Copper Works Mound) had already been ruined by the time he first saw the site. The Central Mound remained ten feet high with a diameter of forty feet, "though injured by pilferers of Indian relics." It was rapidly being leveled by excavations for gravel and clay for the Springwells brick yards. "On and around this spot," he wrote, "for the extent of an acre, were thickly strewn bones and broken pottery, mingled with shell beads, stone knives and arrow-points."

In an odd twist, the need for a new fort at Detroit would doom one of the remaining sand hill mounds but help preserve the other. In 1815, Duncan McArthur, Commander of the Army of the Northwest, wrote to Secretary of War James Monroe: "In my humble opinion, the Fort at Detroit should be destroyed and a strong picketted work erected at Spring Well." The sand hill was an ideal site, being on high ground, at the only bend in the Detroit River, and at the river's narrowest point. Fort Wayne was finally constructed in the 1840s, laying waste to the Central Mound in the process. In 1965, archaeologists excavating the north glacis of the fort discovered some fragments of prehistoric artifacts and human bone, and concluded that material from the ruined mound was used in constructing the embankment.

The Fort Wayne Mound

Hubbard remembered the Fort Wayne Mound in the 1830s was six feet tall and covered with trees. For a time its position on government land kept is safe from both archaeologists and real estate developers. The fort's officers quarters were simply built alongside it.


Undated photo of the Fort Wayne Mound in front of Officers' Row.
Image courtesy Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library. (Source.)
The mound would not be safe forever. Ethnologist Henry Gillman received permission from the War Department to open it in late 1875 and began an excavation with the Detroit Scientific Association on May 22, 1876. His report noted that the mound remained about five feet tall, and that it had been sodded six years prior in order to prevent further erosion. Gillman's team cut a seven foot wide trench through the center of the mound running east to west, then ran two additional trenches from the center to the south and north. The excavation yielded the usual items--human bones, pottery, stone and quartz tools, etc. At what was believed to be the center of the mound, Gillman discovered a clay urn that contained cremated human remains, a copper knife, and two seashells. In all he recovered sixteen burials.


The Springwells Mound Group.
From The Mound-Builders and Platycnemism in Michigan, by Henry Gillman
Around 1920, then-quartermaster of Fort Wayne, Franklin Lamb, was curious about the mound and decided to dig into it. This incident was revealed during a 1921 trial when Lamb was accused of arson at the fort. According to a March 19, 1921 story in the Detroit Free Press, Lamb reported his findings of "perfect specimens of Indian pottery, weapons and all sorts of utensils" to the war department, but received an order from the secretary of war to "restore the mound to its original condition," citing "an old treaty between the United States and the Indian tribes formerly located in Michigan" which dictated that "burying places and stores of the native found should not be disturbed." The article did not name the specific treaty referred to, and no other information about this event has been found.

Over the years, Gillman's and Lamb's excavations were forgotten, and all that were remembered were vague rumors of the mound being somehow related to human burials. In 1944, the fort's commandant, Col. Harry Adamson, requested and received permission to determine exactly what the mound was. (By then it was being been used as a children's playground.) The excavation began on July 1, 1944 by the Aboriginal Research Club of Detroit, a group organized in 1935 by artifact collectors, and loosely affiliated with the University of Michigan. Their excavation began at the sidewalk that cuts through the base of the mound on its north side, and they soon discovered fragments of bone, pottery, and stone tools.


Excerpt from the Detroit Free Press, July 2, 1944.
Not long after their work began, Gillman's report was rediscovered, and the team's approach was altered. They would begin at the west end of the site and work their way east, almost completely excavating the entire mound. They worked through the summer and autumn of 1944, breaking for the winter. Work resumed on May 20, 1945 and again continued through the autumn. Every object and all human remains that were taken from the mound were handed over to the University of Michigan.


A clay vessel taken from the Fort Wayne Mound by Holmquist's team.
Image courtesy University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology.
After the excavation was complete, the mound was "restored" with a bulldozer and steam shovel, and the final shape was touched up with hand tools. This work was completed on November 4, 1945. The sandy mound was later covered with topsoil and seeded to prevent erosion. The report by Carl E. Holmquist, president of the Aboriginal Research Club, notes that the site is "still...a burial mound" because "some human remains" were left beneath the sidewalk that skirts the northern side. Evidently he did not want to disturb the pavement.

If you visit the site today, you will see that a portion of this sidewalk has been removed. However, according to Historic Fort Wayne's manager, James Conway, the remains that were beneath the pavement were left intact.

A plan of Holmquist's 1944-45 excavation, also showing Gillman's 1876 trenches.
From The Springwells Mound Group of Wayne County, Michigan, by John R. Halsey,
published in Anthropological Papers No. 32, University of Michigan.

From The Springwells Mound Group of Wayne County, Michigan, by John R. Halsey,
published in Anthropological Papers No. 32, University of Michigan.
Between Gillman and Holmquist, approximately fifty human remains were taken from the Fort Wayne Mound. Some were flesh burials, others were buried as bundles of bones denuded of flesh. Among the skeletons whose sex could be identified, burial goods were only present with women. Women outnumbered men among those who died young, and men outnumbered women among those who died old. Researchers speculate that this is due to a combination of childbirth trauma and a division of labor that unfairly burdened women.

Radiocarbon dating was performed on some of the samples retrieved. Material from a "bundle" burial dated to the year 1159 A.D. A bone sample from an individual burial--a woman who had died at about the age of 18--dated to 750 A.D.

Carstens' Mound

John Henry Carstens was born in the German state of Holstein around 1820 and fled to the United States after the failed 1848 revolutions in Europe. He opened a saloon with outdoor recreation facilities across the road from Fort Wayne at the intersection of Jefferson Avenue and Crawford Street.


(Source.)
In the summer of 1870, workers dug into a sandy knoll on Carstens' property in order to set up a target practice area for the German Sharpshooters Society. In the process human remains and "Indian relics" were unearthed, and it was discovered that this hill was in fact another burial mound. Bela Hubbard and others referred to this site as "Carstens' Mound," but Henry Gillman called it the "Circular Mound."


Chipped stone projectile points taken from Carsten's Mound in 1870.
Image courtesy Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
Carstens removed twelve skeletons from the mound in addition to pottery, clay pipes, tools of stone and animal bone, a copper necklace, and a nine inch long copper awl. Mr. Carstens put these items out on display at his beer garden.


Copper beads taken from Carstens' Mound in 1870.
Image courtesy Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
Around 2008, archaeologists from Commonwealth Cultural Resources Group, Inc. of Jackson, conducting an archaeological impact study for the Detroit Riverfront International Crossing, attempted to find some trace of the mound. They excavated the area where it was believed to have been, but no evidence of prehistoric artifacts was discovered. (Their very interesting reports can be read here: Part 1 | Part 2)

The Springwells Earthwork

Southwest of the great sand hill was an expansive marsh, in the middle of which was several acres of dry land adjacent to the Detroit River. On this land was a circular enclosure standing between three and four feet tall and encompassing about an acre and a half. Brown's 1817 Western Gazetteer describes it as "the remains of an ancient fortification", although it was probably not used for defensive purposes. Blois and Hubbard also described this earthwork, noting that an opening faced the Detroit River, and that two straight parallel embankments a few feet apart had been built over the marsh to connect this land to the sand hill. Hubbard wrote that the earthwork was not haphazardly formed, remarking instead that "the regularity of the work marks it as one of studied design."


The Springwells Earthwork.
From Memorials of a Half-Century by Bela Hubbard.
In 1889, a writer for the Detroit Free Press noted that the Springwells Earthwork was still in a "tolerably good state of preservation," and might be an interesting attraction for attendees of the nearby Detroit International Exposition (Free Press, 20 Oct 1889). But in 1903, the Detroit Edison Company purchased this land in order to construct a power plant. If any remnant of the earthwork existed at that time, it was certainly wiped out by the excavation for the building's foundation. The photo below shows this site from the southwest looking northeast in 1898. The structure on the river appears to be a boathouse on land owned by George Webber adjacent to the fort. One of the clusters of trees pictured here might mark the location of the earthwork, as Hubbard noted that "ancient oaks and rambling grape-vines (were) its sole occupants" when he first visited it.


A cluster of trees likely mark the location of the Springwells Earthwork.
Image courtesy Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library (Source.)
Click here for a different photo of the same location.

Teams preparing to excavate for the foundation of a power house for Detroit Edison in 1903. The ancient Springwells Earthwork was probably razed at this time.
Image courtesy Detroit Historical Society. (Source.)

The Great Mound of the River Rouge

Dwarfing all other burial mounds in the vicinity was the massive Great Mound of the River Rouge, located in what is now Detroit's Delray neighborhood. Gillman estimated that it originally measured 200 feet wide by 300 feet long--covering more than an acre--and standing forty feet tall. But it may have been even larger. In researching this mound, Hubbard consulted longtime Delray resident Augustus D. Bordeno around 1885, and more than thirty years later archaeologist Harry L. Spooner interviewed Bordeno's son Louis. (Spooner's research appeared in a September 28, 1919 piece in the Detroit Free Press as well as an article in the Summer 1931 issue of Michigan History Magazine.) According to the Bordenos, the mound was a massive 400 feet wide and 800 feet long.


From Memorials of a Half-Century by Bela Hubbard.
Most of the mound sat on a ribbon farm designated Private Claim 718 after the United States took command of Detroit. The U.S. land patent was issued to John Askin, who died in 1815. Two years later his widow, Archange Askin, sold the farm to Cornelius Leonard Lenox, an African American former slave who came from Newton, Massachusetts with Michigan's first governor, William Hull. Lenox died in 1853, and his widow, Candis Lenox, sold the portion of the farm south Jefferson Avenue to James W. Sutton in 1860. The south two-thirds of this land was then sold to Henry Barns in 1864. Barns briefly operated the Detroit Improved Brick Company here before selling the property to the Detroit City Glass Works in 1868. The following year, the Detroit Free Press noted: "Flint arrow heads--Indian relics--are frequently found on the large sand mound at the River Rouge, near the glass works." (17 Oct 1869)


Image courtesy Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library. (Source)
According to Louis Bordeno, the parcel containing the mound came into the possession of "the Chase estate"--probably Elisha and Caroline Chase. Because the sand could be used to make mortar and served other building purposes, the Chases hired Augustus Bordeno and his son to dig down the mound, boat the sand up to the docks at Detroit, and sell it for 2½ cents per barrel. Louis Burdeno estimated conservatively that he and his father removed 1,300 skeletons from the burial mound. "When the diggers came to a skeleton," Spooner wrote, "they put it on a wheelbarrow, wheeled it to the [Rouge] river, and dumped it in." Perhaps some of these survived further decay, and now lie beneath several feet of river sediment. If the Bordenos' estimate of the mounds' size is correct, then it must have contained something like six million cubic feet of sand. Its desecration had to have taken place over many years by dozens of individuals. By the time Gillman and Hubbard wrote of the mound in the 1870s and 1880s, its height had been reduced to 20 feet. "For nearly half a century," Hubbard lamented, "portion after portion has been dug away and removed, by wagon load and boat load, and little notice taken of its contents, until now it is but a miniature of its former self.... [T]housands of fragments of human bones still lie bleaching on the sand."


The likely position and location of the Great Mound, shown here at 400 by 800 feet,
superimposed over an 1860 plat map of Wayne County.
The vast number of skeletons found within this mound is consistent with the practice of the Huron Feast of the Dead. The Huron / Wyandot people would gather every ten to fifteen years, disinterring relatives who had died since the last festival and bringing their bones, bundled in beaver furs, to a sacred communal burial site.


A 1724 depiction of a Huron Feast of the Dead.
From Moeurs des Sauvages Amériquains, by Joseph-François Lafitau.
Gillman made at least two excavations into the Great Mound, in 1869 and 1874. Hubbard was present during the one in 1874. These diggings showed that the mound began as a natural hill of gravel and sand perhaps ten feet high. The upper thirty feet were built up by human hands over the course of centuries. As each burial took place, more sand was brought from the banks of the river to pile it even higher. To imagine the dimensions described by the Bordenos, picture an area the size of the two segments of Grand Circus Park combined, covered by forty feet of sand, bearing in mind that the upper three-quarters of this volume was placed there by human hands.


Sand from the Great Mound, donated to Harvard University by Gillman in 1869.
Image courtesy Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

Clay vessel donated to Harvard University by Gillman in 1872,
from either the Great Mound of the River Rouge or Carsten's Mound.
Image courtesy Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
"Since the burrowings of the scientists," complained the Free Press, "the sand of which the mound is composed has been taken up by the wind and carried about. ... The drifting sand became a nuisance to the people in the vicinity, and the owner the other day gave two lots for the hauling off and leveling of the land." (28 Jul 1878) Even still, a fragment of the Great Mound persisted for another decade, just to the east of Private Claim 718. The final blow was yet to come.

The Great Exposition

In 1889, a group of prominent Detroiters gathered to plan an immense agricultural and industrial fair that they would call the Detroit International Exposition. At a meeting on March 18, 1889, the stockholders selected a portion of the former Moses W. Field farm--which contained a remnant of the Great Mound--to purchase for the event. The investors bought the 69.96 acres from James McMillan for $140,000, and hired the architecture firm of Scott, Kamper and Scott to design the grand exhibition hall, claimed to be the largest ever constructed for an international fair. It would open on September 17, 1889 and last ten days.


Illustration of the Detroit International Exposition grounds, exaggerated in size.
From Harper's Weekly magazine, August 17, 1889.
On May 9, 1889, the Free Press reported:

The excavators at work on the front end of the Field farm, the site of the exposition, yesterday unearthed the skeletons of a score of Indian braves, buried there in the days of Pontiac. An old knife and several strings of beads were among the find."

The property was open to the general public in the summer months before the official opening of the exposition. Visitors were openly encouraged to pillage what was left of the mound:

Many curiosity seekers searched the grounds for relics, of which there are continual finds since the recent opening by one of the excavators of a well-filled Indian burial mound, and it is reported that several of the seekers were rewarded by discoveries of more or less value. As the work of ditching and grading proceeds fresh relics are liable to be exhumed every day." (Free Press, 2 Jul 1889)

Also that year, four skeletons--two adults, one child, and one infant--unearthed from the site were given to an unnamed "local politician," who eventually donated them to the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology.


Another view of the Detroit International Exposition property, also exaggerated.
Image courtesy Detroit Historical Society. (Source.)
Casual weekend desecration of sacred burial sites was nothing new in Detroit. The sand hill at Springwells was a popular picnicking spot in the early 1800s, and the burial mounds were frequently hacked into by amateur treasure hunters. Thomas Palmer, writing of his childhood in Detroit in the 1830s, recalled:

"The banks [of the Detroit River] were covered with many Indian mounds, and my teachers used to take me down Saturdays often times to see them dig for Indian skeletons and the curios which had been buried with them. In my playhouse I had quite a collection of Indian heads which time had prepared for the museum or for jack-o'-lanterns."

Of course, one did not need to visit the Springwells Mounds to disrupt a burial ground in Detroit's early days. In the 1830s, according to Hubbard,

"It was hardly possible to dig a cellar or level a hillock without throwing out some memorial of the red races... To unearth a human skeleton was a common occurrence. They were thrown out by spade and plough, and sometimes were seen protruding from the soil where the action of the waves had broken into the land."

From Archaeological Atlas of Michigan, by Wilbert B. Hinsdale.
The Detroit International Exposition remained an annual event for several years. Before opening in 1890, it was reported that the walkways throughout the grounds would be less dusty than before because they were to be covered with the great quantity of fine gravel "found under the center of one axis of where formerly stood the great prehistoric Indian mound." (Free Press, 29 Jun 1890) The destruction of the Great Mound of the River Rouge was complete.

The exposition company's stockholders sold the land to the Solvay Process Company, a soda ash manufacturer, in 1895. In the decades that followed, the surrounding property became industrialized beyond the imagination of anyone who ever saw the Great Mound with their own eyes. Delray residents suffer from some of the worst air pollution in the state. Local commercial activities include coke storage, rock salt mining, steel production, oil refining, yard waste composting, and sewerage treatment.

Two years before the Detroit International Exposition, Hubbard described the Great Mound as a "most picturesque" resting place, surrounded by meadows and a commanding view of what then remained mostly countryside:

"Still, as of old, the warm sunshine rests upon this spot; the sparkling waters lave its base; the winds blow over it from the not distant lake, scattering the dust that once animated human forms. But the beings these cheered in the olden time have all perished from the land; their history is but a fading dream, and the proud pile which they created to immortalize their memory has nearly disappeared, and will soon have vanished altogether, in the progress of an unheeding and remorseless civilization."

The approximate location of the Great Mound of the River Rouge today.
Image courtesy Bing Maps.

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Desecration and Repatriation

It's an ugly fact of human history that when one group conquers another, the defeated nation is looted. Whether motivated by profit or by science, a colonialist mindset tends to rationalize the destruction of ancient burial grounds. Henry Gillman studied the early inhabitants of Detroit not as human beings equal to himself, but as an inferior "other"--a "lower" race. He noted a perforation in the skeletons' humeri, which in his words, "is most frequently met with in the negro race, has also been observed in the Indian, and, though not always present, is quite general in the apes, while it is seldom seen in the white races." In another paper he reiterates that this "Simian" or apelike characteristic, as he put it, "pertain in the largest degree to the lower races of man, while it is very rare or almost absent in the Caucasian." Regarding arm-to-leg ratios, Gillman claimed that a skeleton from the Fort Wayne Mound "approaches the simian proportions," citing "the greater length of the arm in the modern Indian and especially in the negro, as compared with the Whites." The sizes and shapes of the craniums were carefully recorded--the less they resembled the "dolichocephalic" shape of the Caucasian skulls, the more inferior they were deemed to be. Since Gillman, these remains have continued to be handled and stored in a dehumanizing manner.

In 1968, the University of Michigan loaned one of the skeletons taken from the Fort Wayne Mound to the museum that had since opened on the property. Native American activists asked that these human remains--tastelessly displayed in a glass case--be removed from public view. The museum eventually agreed to remove the exhibit, but shipped the bones back to the university rather than retun them to representatives of the Native American community. According to Survival and Regeneration: Detroit's American Indian Community by Edmund Jefferson Danziger, Jr., the University of Michigan ultimately relented, handing over two containers of human remains to Dean George of the North American Indian Association of Detroit in March of 1973. They were subsequently reinterred somewhere in Michigan.


From the Detroit Free Press, February 6, 1973.
Countless incidents like this led to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990. NAGPRA requires institutions that receive federal funds to inventory the Native American human remains and associated funerary objects in their possession, and to return them to descendants or associated tribes. Because institutions clung to their holdings when a definitive tribal affiliation could not be determined, the law was strengthened in 2010. NAGPRA now allows a tribal nation to claim culturally unidentified human remains if they were removed from an area historically occupied by the tribe. In 1995, the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe established the Nibokaan Ancestral Cemetery on their reservation by Mt. Pleasant specifically for human remains repatriated to them. The cemetery has since received and reburied hundreds of remains that had been unearthed from locations all over Michigan.


A repatriation ceremony at the Nibokaan Ancestral Cemetery, May 17, 2013.
Photo courtesy Marcella Hadden, Niibing Giizis Photography.
Some or all human remains taken from the Great Mound of the River Rouge and the Fort Wayne Mound by Gillman were donated to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. Gillman also purchased the items taken from Carstens' Mound and donated most or all of them to the same institution. The four skeletons given to the unnamed "local politician" taken from the Detroit International Exposition site ultimately ended up in the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology, as did the approximately twenty-four distinct burials and remains from eight burial pits from the Fort Wayne Mound retrieved by Holmquist. The whereabouts of all other human remains taken from the Springwells Mound Group--aside from the thousands thrown into Rouge River--may never be known.


A repatriation ceremony at the Nibokaan Ancestral Cemetery, November 18, 2014.
Photo courtesy Marcella Hadden, Niibing Giizis Photography.
Below are data obtained from the National Park Service's NAGPRA database of culturally unidentifiable Native American artifacts. The remains of some individuals are unaccounted for, as the minimum number of individuals (MNI) of the Peabody artifacts add up to only 27, even though more than that had been obtained by Gillman. The numbers of associated funerary objects (AFO) are also indicated.

Institution	Site	Accession #	Year Acquired	MNI	AFO
Peabody Museum	Rouge Mound Group	69-31-10/22209.1	1869	6	42
Peabody Museum	Rouge Mound Group	69-31-10/2217	1869	1	0
Peabody Museum	Rouge Mound Group	72-7-10	1872	10	0
Peabody Museum	Rouge Mound Group	72-7-10/4908	1872	1	0
Peabody Museum	Rouge Mound Group	7-3-10/7120	1873	8	0
Peabody Museum	Rouge Mound Group	85-28-10/38225	1885	1	0
Univ. of Michigan	Exposition Grounds	99	(unknown)	4	0
Univ. of Michigan	Fort Wayne Mound	1629	1945	29	124

Source: http://grantsdev.cr.nps.gov/Nagpra/CUI/Institutions_Report_Input.cfm
According to the University of Michigan's NAGPRA Project Director, Dr. Ben Secunda, physical possession of the four sets of human remains from the Exposition Grounds site was transferred to thirteen tribes collectively on May 16, 2014. The tribes authorized members of the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of Potawatomi Indians to accept the remains on behalf of the group. Dr. Secunda told me via email that the remains taken from the Fort Wayne Mound "are under the legal control of the U.S. Army and the University is assisting them in completing some of their work required under the NAGPRA law and regulations." Consultations with local tribes regarding these and other remains are ongoing, and there is not yet a set date for their transfer.

The ancient earthworks that stood on the shores of the Detroit River for more than a millennium were needlessly destroyed by a society that did not think they were worth caring about. The one survivor among them was essentially fully excavated and simply piled up again, making it debatable whether it truly is the oldest human-made structure in Detroit. The remains of thousands of human beings were thrown into the river or kept as souvenirs. The handful that remain are currently kept by institutions that have already repatriated many ancestry remains. Some day soon, the last of the bones taken so unceremoniously from the mounds at Springwells will be returned to the earth from which they came.