This weekend, when Av and I were on our way to Hamilton, AL for the Jerry Brown Festival (I’ll post about the festival tomorrow), we passed a sign for Old Indian Mound Road, which is just south of town. We turned and before too long, we saw them from the road, across this cotton field:
There’s a place to park – you walk down a trail to get to the mounds – it’s probably only 1/2 – 3/4 of a mile each way.
There are sidewalks and picnic tables around the mounds. The mounds aren’t very tall – probably all of them were 12′ or shorter:
My WPA book doesn’t single-out these mounds, but just says that, “Mound Builder remains are numerous in the valley of the Tombigbee River, where the mounds vary in height from one to thirty feet.”
My ‘Pickett’s History of Alabama’ book discusses the smaller mounds, “to be found in almost every field upon the rivers Tennessee, Coosa, Tallapoosa, Alabama, Cahaba, Warrior and Tombigbee…they are usually from five to ten feet high, from fifteen to sixty feet in circumference at the base, and of conical forms, resembling haystacks. Where they have been excavated they have, invariably, been found to contain human bones, various stone ornaments, weapons, pieces of pottery, and sometimes ornaments of copper and silver…”
A search I did on the web says that Chickasaw Indian Chief Levi Colbert is buried here.
The mounds are on the banks of the Buttahatchee River, which meets up with the Tombigbee River further down. We saw this big nest:
Really pretty.
