Dinner in a Field Hospital, and All The Gettysburg Ghosts

 

Check out the balls found embedded in this tree from the Gettysburg battlefield, now on display in the Visitor Center at the Gettysburg National Military Park! Usually the tree grew over the places where a ball or bullet was embedded, and it's only discovered if it later has to be cut down and a saw hits it, so these are rare for how obvious they are.

We were told that it's also a mark of distinction (ahem) to own a Gettysburg house that has bullet marks, so the Farnsworth House, which Mr. Craft Knife and I saw while we killed time hoofing it around downtown before our evening ghost tour, must be a big winner!

All the white pockmarks are from bullets.

After sightseeing all the important spots from the first day of the battle, we ate dinner at Dobbin House, the oldest standing structure in Gettysburg, probable station on the Underground Railroad, and field hospital during the Battle of Gettysburg. Most of the rooms are fancy and require reservations, but you can dine as a walk-in in the basement springhouse, and it feels just as authentic with the decorations, wait staff in period clothing, candles on the table, and just general vibe of old-timey-ness:

I soaked up my Rum Bellies Vengeance, a cocktail so delicious that I just spent the last 45 minutes looking for a copycat recipe (maybe this one?), with an open-faced Reuben and some potato salad. 

I'm not really a ghost tour person, but in Gettysburg, at least during early May, which I was told is still considered the low season, they really roll up the sidewalks downtown after business hours, and I wanted to do *something* in the evening other than sit in my hotel room and watch hockey. I'd even have happily sat in a historic old bar and watched hockey, but those all closed early, too!

So a ghost tour it was!

I'd actually come very close to booking a ghost "hunt" instead, because those at least took place inside a genuine historic home of interest (and they let you hold an EMF detector!) and the weather forecast was looking miserable, but Mr. Craft Knife, who very rarely balks at any of my suggested plans, balked at this one. He said it would be too cornball, but maybe what he meant to say is that he would be too scared.

You know who else was scared?

Our ghost tour guide!

He 100% tried to dodge out of doing our tour, but to be fair to him, it actually had worked up to be quite a bit of a storm right before the tour was supposed to start. I'm normally not one to risk being struck by lightning, but the tour had said "rain or shine," I had on my six-buck poncho that I absolutely intended to return to Wal-mart afterwards (and I did!), and I wasn't dipping out of my tour without my money back, which this dude clearly had no authority to make happen. The other attendees obviously felt the same, considering that we all stood around him wearing our rain ponchos and remaining steadfastly neutral and non-responsive while he exclaimed at every lightning flash and talked about how he'd never seen weather like this before and wondered out loud if we should contact the company and ask for refunds.

Then he called his boss right in front of us to tell her it was storming very badly and he thought he should cancel, and I guess getting shot down while all his customers stood 1.5 feet away listening to the whole thing finally broke him, because after that he gave up and gave us our ghost tour.

And you'll never guess, but when he finally got going, it turns out that he could not stop talking about Gettysburg history and our 1-hour tour turned into at least 1.5 hours, lol.

Also, it was barely sprinkling by the time we got outside, so nobody was actually in (much) danger of being struck by lightning. And afterwards, we tipped him a LOT, so ultimately it was fine and maybe even a good lesson about being brave even when you're scared.

And his stories were VERY good! I wouldn't say that he told ghost stories, per se. He actually told stories from the battle with a lot of historical depth, and then at the end of each one he would sort of tack on some clearly memorized script about ghosts. Y'all already know from my homeschooling days that I am super into place-based learning as a way to enrich one's understanding through the sensory aspects of being present at a target location, and to build context through the physicality of geography, climate, etc., so this foot tour that involved walking down actual historic streets, standing outside each house while we learned about it, turning our heads to follow the tour guide's gestures pointing out the directions of soldiers here and sharpshooters there and field hospitals all around, was interesting and meaningful all on its own, since of course ghosts aren't real.

This is the Jennie Wade House--

--but it was actually her sister, Georgia, who lived there. Georgia had given birth right before the battle, so instead of evacuating she was sheltering in place on the first floor with her mother (the house was a duplex then, so I don't think they had access to the basement). In a brief break in the battle during the first day, Jennie ran over from the family home to shelter with them. She brought a couple more kids with her, so there they were, three women, one immediately post-partum, and three children, one of them a newborn, right in the middle of the fighting.

In the map below, you can see the Jennie Wade House Museum, where they were sheltering. Northwest is McPherson Farm, more north is Oak Ridge, across the street to the south is the hill with Evergreen Cemetery, and immediately to the southeast is Culp's Hill.

In the surrounding houses other citizens who hadn't evacuated cowered in the basements, while in other houses Confederate sharpshooters took over attics and field hospitals were hastily erected on first floors. Field medics performed surgeries and amputations on family dinner tables, and broke the glass out of the windows so they could more easily toss amputated limbs out into the yards. In a few yards, the occasional injured Union soldier lay in hiding, camouflaging themselves the best they could behind a refuse pile or under some of the rubble. Some of these soldiers were aided by Jennie, who frequently left shelter to bring them water from the well in Georgia's yard and bread that she baked in Georgia's kitchen. 

It was while she was standing in the kitchen, kneading dough for yet more loaves of bread, that Jennie was shot and killed. The official story is that it was a stray bullet of unknown provenance, but our tour guide made the excellent point that there were a few houses with Confederate snipers in their attics in sight of Georgia's house, including in the Farnsworth House, and the snipers would have seen Jennie going in and out and known that she was aiding Union soldiers. Alternatively, because the house was in such a clearly dangerous spot, a sniper could have easily assumed that anyone they saw puttering around in the yard or on the other side of a kitchen window obviously wouldn't be a civilian, because that would be CRAZY, and so might have thought that they were sniping an enemy soldier. ALTERNATIVELY alternatively, the house was literally in the middle of No Man's Land, so friendly fire could also have been a possibility.

Regardless, she was a badass and a war hero, and a flag flies over her grave, which is in Evergreen Cemetery just steps from where she died.

Yet another field hospital was located in this building:

Apparently, there really are a ton of people who claim to have experienced paranormal events in this building, and it is true that although it's a historical building in a high-value location, many restaurants have come and gone, with none seeming to be able to stick it out long-term. The most recent, The Hoof, Fin, and Fowl, actually just permanently closed earlier this year.

The national cemetery is on the other side of this house, whose main claim to fame is that fence, part of the same fence that surrounds the national cemetery and that originally came from Lafayette Square Park in Washington, D.C.:

The fence was procured by Civil War veteran and child molester Daniel Sickles, who did a stupid job during the Battle of Gettysburg (he got shot in the leg, had to have it amputated, and it's now in a museum!) but a great job with emancipation, who set up the Gettysburg National Military Park just beautifully but also embezzled a bunch of money, and who murdered Francis Scott Key's kid.

Okay, so the tour guide did tell one story that got to me, so much so that I didn't even take a photo of the house in question, the Gettysburg Orphanage. The orphanage was established after the battle, as a home for the orphaned children of Union soldiers, and during the time of its first headmistress, it was apparently excellent. But the second headmistress was a sadist who did terrible things to the children, so much so that the citizens of the town, who didn't even realize the true extent of her abuses, eventually figured out enough to raise an outcry that led to an investigation that led to her ouster.

Our tour guide said that people who visited the orphanage during ghost tours sometimes reported encountering the ghosts of the abused children, being touched by little hands or hearing cries or the whispers of little voices asking for help. So first of all, I think that it's gross to tell these awful, looky-looish stories about children, but I get that people have jobs and they've got to do them, and lord knows that my own job palpably makes the world a worse place, sigh, so setting that aside, how completely terrible it is to think that or pretend that abused children would not be at peace after death. Why on earth would you think or pretend that the soul(?) of a child is still actively suffering, and that you're going to go pay money to visit it, and that if it touches you and asks you to help it, you're just going to... what? Shiver and be scared and then later talk about it like it's an awesome story? Would you not want to pay all the money in the world to find every exorcist in the world to do whatever it is that exorcists do to send souls on to the afterlife?

I swear, I have never in my life been so grateful to be an atheist, because what the fuck is going on with these ghost-believers?!?

Anyway, the tour guide's story of how a townsperson's pigs got loose during the battle and ate a bunch of dead/dying soldiers was better.

And speaking of dead/dying soldiers... tomorrow, it's back to the battlefield!

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In Which John Burns Is My Favorite Old Coot Of Gettysburg

Let's go on a road trip!

Ohio has both a brand-new Wawa and a brand-new Buccees. Mr. Craft Knife and I tried the Buccees a few weeks prior when it was more crowded than Disneyland and I did NOT get the hype, but what with all our drives back and forth to Pennsylvania, I DO now get the Wawa hype!

I didn't ever tell you the story about how the kid and I messed up ordering at Wawa SOOOOO badly during our long-ago trip to see the college that would become her alma mater, because it is genuinely humiliating and the kid and I vowed never to speak of it again (while still almost constantly referring to it to each other, because we literally cannot process it, it was so embarrassing). But because of that, every time I visit a Wawa and its ordering kiosk has actual instructions, I always take a picture and get a little madder at the Independence Hall Wawa. I hate you, you guys! You exist in one of the biggest tourist spots in the country--WHY IS YOUR SPECIFIC ORDERING KIOSK SO NON-INTUITIVE?!? WHY ARE YOU SO HIGH-KEY RUDE ABOUT IT!!!

I once again managed to convince Mr. Craft Knife not only to come with me on this trip to pick our daughter up from college, but also to make a proper sightseeing trip of it, so I had someone to take pictures of me chatting with Lincoln at Gettysburg National Military Park!

Bro is soooo much taller than me--my feet barely even reach the ground in front of his favorite reading bench!

Also, he is the only person in the family patient enough to drive me wherever along the battlefield I want to go, hang out with me while I read every plaque, stand where I tell him to stand while I take photos of him in front of every significant (and insignificant) spot, and basically just do whatever I tell him to do while I am also being very, very, very boring about it.

I can remember the exact moment, approximately a decade ago, when I let a friend borrow my audio tour of Gettysburg on CD, but it's definitely too late to ask for it back now, ahem, so instead, Mr. Craft Knife and I relied on the NPS app for this first day of battlefield touring.

Here we are looking northwest towards the McPherson Farm:

On the morning of June 30, 1863, soldiers from the US cavalry and soldiers from the Confederate infantry were VERY surprised to discover each other on the road in front of McPherson's barn. In the image below, the road, Chambersburg Pike (because it runs from Chambersburg!) is the Hwy 30 just to the north of the McPherson Farm label, which marks McPherson's barn. My photos are taken from around the 1st Brigade 1st Division Cavalry Corps memorial.

This Confederate army, headed by Robert E. Lee, had sneaked past the US forces and into Pennsylvania, hoping to draw the US army out of the Confederate territories for the summer so that the Southern farmers could get a proper harvest for the first time since the war had begun, the better for the Confederates to steal it all later. He also hoped that putting battles in front of Northern faces would convince Northern politicians to press for peace, because who wants a battle right in front of their face (spoiler alert: definitely not the citizens of Gettysburg!)? He'd accomplished the sneaking part, and now he was stationed in Chambersburg, and his entire 75,000-person army was stretched in a big semi-circle over and around Gettysburg, busy pillaging and raiding and looting the countryside.

But the Union was chasing them north, just like Lee had wanted, except that Lee didn't know exactly where they were, because his cavalry, headed by Jeb Stuart, was also out and about, wandering around far from home base, and if Stuart sent Lee any communications about the location of Union troops, Lee didn't receive them.

The Union didn't know where the Confederate army was, either, but their 2,700-horse cavalry was nearby, trotting ahead of the army keeping their eyes open, and that's who spotted the Confederate infantry marching down Chambersburg Pike towards Gettysburg on June 30. The Confederates spotted them, too. 

And then both sets of forces literally noped out, lol! They both just reversed themselves right back where they came from and decided they'd deal with it tomorrow.

Which was July 1, 1863!

So, the morning of July 1, the Union cavalry had set up super early on Chambersburg Pike (the yellow road on the map), around the Herrs Ridge Road line (far left), keeping an eye out for the inevitable march of the infantry to show up from the west. When they spotted each other, that's when the Battle of Gettysburg began:

So, you've got 2,700 Union cavalry versus 10,000 Confederate infantry. Both sets of forces are basically just trying to hold off the other set until reinforcements arrive, but it's harder for the cavalry, because not only were they fewer in number, but they also didn't actually fight on horseback, so some of the cavalry had to opt out of fighting just to hold everyone else's horses for them. But it also sucks for the infantry, because every time they have to fight they basically all have to stop marching, and most of them have to get off the road and scramble over ditches and fences so they can line up right. And then they succeed in pushing the cavalry back a little bit, which the cavalry had actually planned for so they've got a few spots down Chambersburg Pike where they can retreat, and they have time to do that because before the infantry can follow them, they keep having to scramble back out of the fields and pastures and back into lines on the road.

Late in the morning, the Union cavalry finally got their first infantry reinforcements, the 1st Corp led by General Reynolds. He deployed the infantry to the north and south of Chambersburg Pike, including in that woods at the bottom of the picture. The woods mark the spot where he was also almost immediately killed, poor dude. Abner Doubleday was field promoted to take his place. But later that day, when General Meade finally arrived, he demoted Doubleday and made somebody else the 1st Corps Commander, and Doubleday pretty much sulked about that for the rest of his life.

Also, he maybe invented baseball.

The best part of the Google Map is that you can use all the memorials to figure out where everybody was in the battle. My favorite memorial is for John Burns, just north of the woods. He was just some old dude, a random pissed off civilian who'd already been agitating against the Confederate occupation in the previous days (including citizen arresting a few Confederates during their earlier pass-through, lol!), and who on this day took himself out onto the battlefield with an antique Revolutionary War musket to get those damn Confederates off his lawn, goddamnit! 

At one point, he managed to wheedle a proper rifle off of a wounded Union infantryman, and at another point, the general of the Pennsylvania infantry was able to convince him to at least go fight in the woods where he'd be out of the sun (and possibly the way, ahem). Burns paid him back, though, by fighting like a total badass in the woods, even shooting a Confederate officer clean off his horse. And later, when he was wounded and had to be left on the field while the Union soldiers retreated (more on that later), he convinced the Confederates that he was actually a non-combatant who'd just happened to get caught up in the cross-fire. They apparently didn't recognize him from his earlier agitation against Confederate troops, so they let him go back to town, where he recovered from his wounds and lived another nine years as a national hero.

Fun fact: when Abraham Lincoln came to Gettysburg the next year to dedicate the new national cemetery, he was asked if there was anything he wanted to do in town, and he replied that actually, he'd quite like to meet John Burns. So he did, and by all reports the two got along great!

Anyway, it's a good thing that Reynolds had deployed some of the Union forces north of Chambersburg Pike, because there was a whole northern segment of the Confederates, who'd been pillaging and looting north of Gettysburg, who had now managed to bust their butts to get back down south to meet those Union forces. They had a whole other fight on Oak Ridge, north of Chambersburg Pike and north of Gettysburg:

Buford's monument marks where that morning fighting was. Lincoln Highway is what they're calling Chambersburg Pike. At the bottom you can see the north edge of Gettysburg.

This spot has a nice observation tower where you can look out onto most of the first day's fighting:

This view shows where the Confederate forces came from the north:

And this view is to the southwest, back toward Chambersburg Pike and the morning battles:

There was a lot of back-and-forthing, and the monuments here are interesting to read because they're all, "In this spot so-and-so division was posted, then they advanced and shot some people, then they retreated and were shot at, then they advanced again for a little bit and did some more shooting, then they were chased screaming through town. Most of them died." Out of the 296 soldiers from the Pennsylvania division that this monument memorializes, seven were killed, 52 were wounded, and 31 were either captured or just plain went missing:

These new Confederate forces coming in from the north actually overwhelmed the Union force, who retreated south through the streets of Gettysburg (while the citizens cowered in their basements) all the way through town. Just south of town were two hills, one wooded and one bare, and that's where the Union was finally able to make their stand to end out the first day of battle.

The Gettysburg National Cemetery/Evergreen Cemetery area and Culp's Hill are where they ended up: 

And that's the end of the first day of battle!

Next up: dinner in a former field hospital, then a ghost tour with the world's most reluctant ghost tour guide.

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I Still Hate George Rogers Clark, But Vincennes Has Two Native American Mounds, Only One Of Which I'd Seen Before

Also, Mr. Craft Knife knew I was lonely for my kids and there's nothing that will cheer me up like a national park passport stamp.

And it doesn't hurt that I'm desperate to watch Project Hail Mary on IMAX but we're listening to the book on CD first, and a day trip is a great way to bust through a good three CDs!

So, off to Vincennes!

I've only been to Vincennes, and the George Rogers Clark National Historical Park, once before, on a family day trip way back when the kids were ten and twelve and we were studying the American Revolution. I was in a phase of trying to turn composition books into single-subject journals in which the kids could take notes and record their thoughts and paste documents and write essays. We could then keep the notebooks, and every time we returned to that same subject, the kids could use them for review and then add all their new information. I still think this is an AMAZING idea, but the kids never stopped being horrified by it, so eventually I gave up.

And that's why they now don't remember all their states and capitals or all the original 13 colonies!

Anyway, I was still very much insisting on American Revolution notebooks during this homeschool field trip, and I'm so happy I did (and a little bummed at myself for not holding the line forever) when I can pull out gems like this, written by the older kid as a travel journal entry after this trip:

This was also the day that I discovered that my 10-year-old could correctly utilize scare quotes!

It's been just almost ten years since that trip, and nothing has changed. The older kid still thinks that all money would best be served by being given to her, the younger kid still strongly emits in every encounter the sentiment implied by scare quotes, and the George Rogers Clark Memorial still sits on top of the site that used to be Fort Sackville:

OT, but why am I genuinely channeling my Pappa in this photo, with my hands shoved into my pockets and my phone on prominent display in the cargo pocket equivalent of a cellphone holster? All I need is a couple of handfuls of coins and keys to jingle.

Random gossip: back in the 1930s, when plans for this building were being made and bids were being taken for the work, the limestone lobby and the granite lobby got into a big fight. The limestone lobby was all, "Yo, The building should obviously be made from Indiana limestone, because INDIANA. Granite isn't even FROM here!"

And then the granite lobby was all, "Yeah, that's awesome if you want your whole building to look like a weathered old gravestone in 30 years. You know what DOESN'T literally dissolve in the rain? GRANITE."

Ultimately, it was decided to do the outside parts in granite and the inside parts in limestone, but then someone found out that the granite they were planning to use was being sourced from Canada (gasp!), and both the limestone lobby AND the granite lobby freaked out. 

Don't worry, y'all. They eventually found enough US granite to complete the project and peace was restored.

I know the people of the early 1900s were allllllll about their huge granite memorials (see: Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park), but I far prefer the historical recreation school of thought (see Fort Necessity National Battlefield). Instead of a huge monument right where Fort Sackville used to be, wouldn't you prefer a life-sized recreation of Fort Sackville? 

At least they can't take away the river across which Clark and his "army" (lol, that kid!) sneaked... although they CAN channelize it, it seems!

There's not much of a riparian buffer zone on the east bank, but regular flooding is more historically accurate, I guess:

We walked across the bridge to get a landscape view of the site. There also used to be a French village in the area, but I'm not sure where:

You can kind of imagine a fort right where that big granite monument is!

This is my partner, who literally DROVE US HERE, being disturbingly surprised that we're at the edge of the state:

I was all, "Well, we drove southwest until we got to the Wabash River. What did you think was going to be on the other side?"

He replied, "Um... more Indiana?"

Come on, Dude! The Wabash River is the state river of Indiana! It marks the the southwest border of the state almost all the way up to Terre Haute, and then somehow manages to wrap around Indiana and end up on the other side of the state in Ohio! There have been songs written about it and how it's literally right here! One of those songs is literally the Indiana state song!

Ten years ago, I would have smugly informed him that he was welcome to join our homeschool anytime. On this day, however, I had to just let a smug look suffice.

This church isn't original to the site, but the cemetery is, and it's the site of the original church:

I feel a lot of sympathy for the French citizens of the original town, who probably spent all day, every day, swearing allegiance back and forth to whoever had happened to wrest temporary control over the fort next door.

I don't feel any sympathy for any widower who names his dead wife as his "consort" on her tombstone:

It's apparently just the term they used on a headstone when the wife predeceased the husband, but you and I both know good and well that's so the dude could marry again five minutes later and not have to worry about a whole string of "wife" headstones tagging along behind him. You only get to be his "wife" when he dies first, because that's the only way you wouldn't get supplanted!

This headstone, however, is lovely:

You do have to ignore the apostrophe error, though. I'm too lazy to look up when punctuation was completely standardized, but I'm pretty confident this would have always been wrong. It's a plural, not a possessive!

To the memorial!

I don't know if y'all know about my lord and savior Baumgartner Restoration, but his videos are AMAZING and will cause you to become weirdly invested in art restoration, to such an extent that when you walk into a building and see old-looking art, you'll ask the nearest park ranger about what restoration looks like for that art.

And then he'll tell you, because park rangers are also amazing!

I learned that these are not actually murals, but canvases painted in a warehouse and then installed here using marouflage. The park ranger even pointed out a couple of place where you could see some wrinkling where the canvas hadn't adhered smoothly. He also mentioned this canvas that had been revised, because from the viewing angle it originally looked like that one prone soldier on the right was aiming at George Rogers Clark, lol!

The park ranger and I yapped so much that this poor dude eventually had to sit down and dissociate, lol:

He got his revenge, though, because later he left me standing by the bathrooms, wondering where on earth he was, while he'd actually wandered off to have a whole entire conversation about these Art Deco bronze embellishments with that same park ranger!

How do you end up with the Zodiac on an American Revolution memorial?

Art Deco!

My absolute favorite component is the corn:

I also like George Rogers Clark, his nose polished because that's where everyone touches him:

Fun fact: the memorial is literally falling apart, with the original bronze doors collapsing and the skylight starting to fall in and leaks from all over during every rain. There's no way to get the money to repair it, though, because Trump cut funding to the national parks. Who needs to preserve our national legacy when we can instead have a dictator's private army of jackbooted thugs committing human rights violations on our streets? 

At this point, I need to tell you that other than the Jackbooted Thug in Chief, Mr. Craft Knife and I are the dumbest fucks on the planet. To reiterate, this is the George Rogers Clark memorial:

There's a set of steps to get into the inside, and then a covered area all the way around that colonnade, and then another paved area below that enclosed by that middle wall. The bottom wall just has landscaping inside of it. 

To our credit(?), each of these areas is expansive, and it's unclear--if you're a dumb fuck, at least!--where any additional points of egress might be.

So when Mr. Craft Knife and I, busily yapping our heads off to each other, left the building, walked down a set of steps, and turned right, we found ourselves walking around the entire building via that colonnade. We kept expecting there would be another set of steps down, but nope! We walked around, spying the visitor center we wanted to go to in the distance, continued around, admired the river, and eventually circled back to the first set of stairs we saw, which we now noticed continued down another flight.

"Lol, us!" we said, walked down that flight of stairs, and turned right to go to the visitor center.

It wasn't until we saw--and then passed--it in the distance that we realized we were on that paved area below the memorial that was also elevated and walled off. But surely there would be another set of stairs HERE! Nope! There goes the river for the second time! Hello again, statue of Francis Vigo, namesake of Vigo County!

Eventually we reached, yes, that exact same set of stairs again, and noticed that oh, right, it continues down ANOTHER FUCKING FLIGHT.

Finally, we managed to conquer the world's easiest escape room, and could go get my passport stamp!

That's 34 down, and 399 to go!

Burrito and margarita break:

Now, onto the mounds!

There's a lot of conflicting information about Sugarloaf Mound and Pyramid Mound, and it's not immediately clear what information is authoritative. This webpage, for instance, names Pyramid Mound but has photos and driving direction for Sugarloaf Mound, making it unclear which mound the descriptions refer to. The Wikipedia page for Pyramid Mound also shows photos of Sugarloaf Mound. The Megalithic Portal site has accurate info on its page about Sugarloaf Mound, but its page about Pyramid Mound... also shows an image of Sugarloaf Mound, sigh.

Here's what's written about Sugarloaf Mound in the 1911 History of Old Vincennes:

Fortunately, a study of Sugar Loaf Mound was done in 1998. It found that Sugar Loaf Mound is natural--it's essentially a sand dune formed from all the silt/loess blowing around after the glaciers receded. The "red altar clays" are a misidentification, but there was significant human activity on the mound, as this study found human bones and chert in the core samples. The author theorizes that the mound was used as a "cemetery" by the Late Woodland peoples. The Woodlands people just loved burying each other on top of nice knolls! This article said they'd sometimes build artificial burial mounds, too, but those were pretty small--what they really liked is a nice, tall mound that was already there for them. So now I'm wondering if they'd also take advantage of the super old Mound Builder-era mounds and also pop some of their corpses in. Or maybe they thought that these mounds WERE from the Mound Builder era, since they look so similar!

You certainly can't beat the view from the top:

...and of course I've got my hands in my pockets again:

I made my partner walk alll the way down by himself so he could take a photo of me looking tiny at the top. It's not every day that you get to stand on top of a mound!

Just between us, it's a little less exciting when it's not an earthwork that was built by the ancient peoples, but if they thought it was special, then so do I.

Although the author of "The Geomorphology of Sugar Loaf Mound" didn't also sample Pyramid Mound, he theorizes that it's also natural, since it has the same shape and is in a similar geographic situation that could have resulted in the same type of dune formation. A previous excavation of that mound uncovered more human burials and a piece of the fancy Yankeetown pottery. This sign said that the human remains were repatriated but the pottery lives at Grouseland, the historic home of that asshole William Henry Harrison.

Notice the signage is explicitly calling the mound natural, but as far as I know that hasn't been directly ascertained through core samples or other excavations. But I do think that 1998 Stafford study made a convincing argument!

I've been avoiding paying admission to that bag of dicks' house because I hate him, but I guess now I'll have to!

The whole area of Pyramid Mound is really overgrown, and you probably wouldn't be able to hike it much further into Spring without getting mobbed by ticks:

There's a line of little blue utility flags, though, that mark a trail towards the top, and as you walk it, you can--again, at least this early in the Spring--make out the profile of the mound:

The top of the mound is very overgrown with old trees, but there are also a lot of divots dug deep into the mound, making me wonder if sometimes people sneak up here and do some pothunting:

Sugarloaf Mound is straight ahead in the below photo, and it's actually pretty close. Without the trees in the way, you might even be able to see it from here:

And here's... Jesus Christ, I've got my hand in my pocket AGAIN. I guess my Pappa was really with me that day! 

That's kind of funny, because Pappa would have HAAATED a day trip to mosey around American Revolution crap and big piles of dirt. HIS Special Interest was the Wild West!

P.S. Want more obsessively-compiled lists of resources and activities for geology buffs, history nerds, and lovers of handicrafts? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!