County of park: Mason County
location of park: Franklin St. & N. Orange St. Havana
Designated a city park in 2007
"As long as anybody in Havana can remember, the big flat-topped hill in Rockwell Park has been a center of town social activity.
"Abraham Lincoln spoke there. Al Capone vacationed there. And kids have always sledded down its slopes.
"But it wasn't until Thursday that townspeople discovered what had been underneath their feet all those years-one of the largest, oldest and best-preserved Indian burial mounds in Illinois, dating back 1,800 years.
"Using a sophisticated ground radar system, a team of archeologists and U.S. Soil Conservation Service workers proved Thursday that the 2-acre hill is a burial mound that is more than 1,000 years older than the well-known Indian site of Dickson Mounds, across the Illinois River.
'"It's an astonishing discovery, and right in downtown Havana," said Duane Esarey, an archeologist at Dickson Mounds. "By any account, it`s huge."
"Archeologists believe that the Indians who built the Rockwell Park mound almost two millenniums ago in what is known as the Middle Woodland period were a sophisticated people with a system of riverside village chiefdoms, ruled perhaps by hereditary leaders.
"Although they still relied mainly on hunting and gathering for food, these early Indians also did some farming in the summer and established trading networks with other groups as far away as the Rocky Mountains and Gulf of Mexico.
"With the items they traded for, including obsidian and soft stone from Ohio, the Indian artisans crafted intricate, elegant ceremonial spearheads, and stone pipes shaped to look like animals and birds. They also created uniquely designed pottery, decorated with a series of curves and dots, and embossed copper plates with the shape of eagles.
"But perhaps the society`s greatest achievements were the large earthen burial mounds they built along the riversides, shaped over the years with hundreds of thousands of basket-loads of dirt.
"At the center of each was usually a log tomb, holding the bodies of the most important members of the tribe and some of their prized possessions. Other less-important members were buried elsewhere in the mound, without their belongings, as it was enlarged over the years.
"Since a preliminary dig in 1986, archeologists have known that the Rockwell Park site was probably an Indian mound rather than a sand hill, but Thursday was the first time they got a real view of what lies beneath the sandy topsoil.
"What they found was a series of human-made dirt levels underneath the sand, punctuated by a series of objects, which could be graves or artifacts, Esarey said. The radar, which penetrated 14 feet into the mound, also showed a large central structure that could be the wooden tomb typical of Middle Woodland mounds.
'"We're pretty pleased with the results," Esarey said. "Havana apparently is the center of Middle Woodland civilization in central Illinois."
"That's something most residents of sleepy Havana would never have imagined. Until now, the highlights of the town`s history have been Abraham Lincoln`s visit in 1858, while on a campaign swing for his U.S. Senate race against Stephen Douglas, and Al Capone`s long association with the town, which he favored as a duck hunting resort and where he set up an infamous red light district, just down the street from the hill.
"The interpretations of what lies beneath the ground were made Thursday based on a series of black and white squiggles and blobs produced by the ground radar system, an old technology developed by the U.S. Army and widely used in the Vietnam War to locate underground bunkers and tunnels. Since 1981, the U.S. Soil Conservation Service also has used the technology to do soil surveys.
"Until recently, the technology had never been used on archeological sites, said Jim Doolittle, the soil service's radar expert, in part because it does not work well in clay soils.
"But the radar "gave a very good response" at the Havana mound, Doolittle said, because the soil there, just a few hundred yards from the banks of the Illinois River, is very sandy.
"The radar survey is particularly important at the Rockwell mound, archeologists said Thursday, because the site probably will not be excavated. That`s because the Havana Park District, which owns the land, wants to keep it as a park and because a series of new laws passed in Illinois give special protection to human burial grounds.
"Those laws, created in the late 1980s in the midst of concern by Native Americans over the disturbance of their ancestral burial grounds, require archeologists to get a state permit for any excavation on public land.
"Such permits, according to Tom Emerson of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, right now are being limited almost exclusively to sites slated for development or destruction, unlike the Rockwell site, which is protected by its park status.
'"We've really moved away from digging up sites for fun to see what`s there," said Stan Riggle, an archeologist with the soil conservation service. "Now we just do this at sites that will be destroyed anyway."
'"We view this one as being in the bank," Esarey said of the Rockwell site.
"But that doesn't mean archeologists won`t be able to learn more about the people who built the mounds with an estimated 1.7 million basket-loads of dirt, Esarey said.
"From gleanings at other sites-including a 1-acre Middle Woodland mound north of Havana that was destroyed in the 1940s to make way for a power plant- archeologists know that the early riverside inhabitants traded for grizzly bear and shark`s teeth, made music with pan pipes, wore copper ear spools similar to those in Central America, and engraved stone tablets.
"At the peak, their river valley culture covered eight states, ranging from Iowa and perhaps Nebraska on the west to Ohio and Pennsylvania on the east.
"Archeologists also know a little about the specific Rockwell mound from a test pit dug there in 1986 by Hugh McHarry, a local history enthusiast.
"For years, archeologists had dismissed the Rockwell hill as simply a sand dune, too big to possibly be a mound. But McHarry was never convinced.
'"To one who`s grown up in the area, it just didn't look like another sand ridge," he said. "It doesn't taper off. It ends abruptly."
"For years, McHarry pestered Esarey to try a test dig and take a look. But, Esarey remembers, "I was of the opinion it was not a mound. How could so many archeologists have missed something like that?"
"But, finally, in 1986, Esarey agreed to get state and park district permission for a small test dig if McHarry would do the work. McHarry went to work the next weekend with a shovel and a couple of friends. A six-foot-deep trench revealed nothing-nothing, that is, until Esarey, who lives just down Orange Street in Havana, walked up.
'"That`s when we really hit the jackpot," McHarry remembers. "A shovel- load I had just brought up from the bottom had a chert flake, a sort of flint chip."
"That night, "I didn't sleep a lot," Esarey remembers of his excitement. The next day, on his day off, Esarey pitched in with McHarry, and, together, they turned up 76 different artifacts in a 9-foot-deep trench, including pieces of pottery.
"But the radar tests done Thursday show that, apart from the small test trenches McHarry and Esarey dug on the north and west sides of the hill, the site is undisturbed.
'"Why did this survive?" Esarey says. "Because it has been protected as a park since 1849. And I think because no one ever thought it was a mound." ~ The Chicago Tribune, by Laurie Goering, July 1, 1990