Historical November 1983 report or notice. Original dates, prices and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
Boston has been digging new subway and commuter rail lines for some years, and the line going to Harvard University from Logan airport and downtown should be complete by now.
For museum goers this is significant since Harvard has three rather interesting museums, two with close ties to St. Louis.
The Fogg Museum, Harvard’s art collection, is a marvelous institution about to undergo expansion.
The Busch-Reisinger Museum features the art and artifacts of northern Europe, particularly Germany, and is named in part because of the support it receives from the Busch’s of St. Louis.
The stained glass and tapestries are very nice, along with the medieval armor and sculpture.
But it is the third museum, the Peabody, which has always held special fascination for many people because of its exhibition of Mississippian Indian objects. Salvage archaeology is the contemporary term for what Dr.
David Bushnell and his team from Harvard were doing in Forest Park at the turn of the century.
At this time, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company was clearing land and altering the face of the West end of St. Louis and the east central portion of the county. Bushnell had been sent by the Peabody Institute to rescue what he could in the demolition area before it was all carted off to the swamps north of the park. Just. northeast of the main promontory hill in the west end of the park were sixteen Indian mounds. Below what is now called Art Hill, these mounds were in two groups: nine were in a bend of the River Des Peres; seven were south of these about fifteen hundred feet and on higher ground — the northern face of the rise leading to Art Hill.
The plan for the Exposition called for the construction of a series of lagoons in the area of the River Des Peres.
Not only the mounds but all the trees and land forms in the area were to be altered. Bushnell’s task was to save what he could from the Indian mounds before all was destroyed.
The Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, held in St. Louis, is referred to locally as the World’s Fair.
It was meant to open in 1903 on the centenary of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Like many large projects, it was behind schedule.
It opened a year late, but that year gave Bushnell and his crew the chance they needed to excavate.
There were no laws then to protect cultural and historic properties from wanton destruction. (Some say we have laws now but they do not always stop the destruction.) The Exposition area included half of Forest Park, one square mile, and another square mile west of Skinker Road leased partially from Washington University (then under construe tion) and farmers in the area including the Skinkers and the Forsyths.
All the trees in the west end of the park — the reason the park was called Forest Park — were dynamited out of the ground except for those now called the John F. Kennedy Memorial Forest in the southwest corner.
All remnants of the Indian culture in the park were destroyed. Only what David Bushnell was able to save remained, and all of this went to the Peabody Museum at Harvard. Volume Three of the Papers of the Peabody Museum, published in 1904, contains a very large article by Bushnell.
In that piece he discussed the collection of objects he “saved from St. Louis” along with maps and diagrams of the several mounds groups in and around the city either still extant or already destroyed.
He included pictures of some of the pottery and sculpture he found in addition to numerous tools and evidences of social life.
It was his opinion that the sixteen mounds in Forest Park were the central area of a coal mining village.
This village was a western “suburb” of the main mound city located six or so miles east of the Mississippi River.
The coal — known today as brown coal — was apparently shipped east to the main mound city to provide a source of heat to those who had denuded the area of its trees to build houses and stockades. Outcroppings of the coal can still be seen in undisturbed land formations in Forest Park.
After the Exposition some ten thousand trees were planted in an attempt to replace the forest destroyed for the fair. replace the forest destroyed for the fair. Funds from the fair were also used to build the Jefferson Memorial building which houses the Missouri Historical BuildSociety and one of the largest Mississippian collections in the country.
However, because it was not in a position to accept or perhaps even know about the salvage archaeology of the Indian mounds of Forest Park, it has no pieces from those mounds.
If you are ever in Boston and have a few minutes to go to museums, make sure you go to Harvard and the Peabody Museum.
The Mississippian exhibition used to be on the third floor – it may have changed since 1979.
The staff, particularly the students working in the area, ‘will probably know more than enough to help you understand the collection. Bushnell’s article is well worth reading — if only because it has none of the lamenting of the destruction of the cultural property common today.
At that time it seems it was expected that progress would naturally include the replacing of past historic centers.
His article is as useful to read for its implied philosophy of progress as it is for its historic content regarding the Mississippian mounds which once were along the River Des Peres.
Some of the fill which went into the swamp along the river north of Forest Park was once part of Indians mounds in the park.
Originally published in The Paper, November 1983.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Archival transcription note: Claims about Forest Park mounds, Indigenous coal mining, destruction, artifact collections and the 1904 fair require independent historical verification. A repeated line about replacing the forest and the broken Historical Build-Society wording are printed in the source and retained.
Original source: SD_Times1983_11.pdf, printed page(s) 5; PDF page(s) 5.
