Lafferty Farm near Bellville has a burial mound, whether or not it was human-made

BELLVILLE — In another installment of a series on regional mounds that is unfolding as slowly as geology itself, I bring you today the unofficial Lafferty Mound, a little north of the Knox/Richland County line, near Bellville.

I describe it as unofficial because I can find no records indicating that it has ever been declared an American Indian mound by the state, and is thus regarded as a glacial structure.

That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a burial mound, however, as a number of reports from over the years indicate. It takes its name from the Lafferty family farm, Uriah Lafferty being the owner of the property at the time when stories of the mound were collected in the late 1800s.

The farm is in the very rich valley of the Clear Fork River between Bellville and Butler that also includes the Gatton Rocks area.

Early settlers heard stories directly from the remaining American Indians in the area that some time before the settlers arrived, a prominent native chieftain had been buried at the top of the hill, though his name has not carried down to us.

For a few decades during the early settlement period, Whites and Indians lived alongside each other, though incidences of violence did at times occur.

It is good to know that there were times of peaceful coexistence, as when a young native couple who lived in the area suffered the misfortune of having their 3-year old son die in 1814, from a stomach ailment brought on, according to stories passed down in the area, by eating too many chestnuts.

The boy died, and his parents buried him on the mound in a ceremony attended by many members of their tribe, including singing and dancing around the grave.

At the conclusion of the ceremony, a feast was held which the white settlers were invited to attend. According to a story written in the 1950s by Dwight Wesley Garber and published in the Mansfield News Journal, descendants of the Oldfield and Aungst families still remembered stories of that event, passed down through the generations.

Two of the feast dishes that were remembered was roast fox and bear gut stew. The whites liked the former but not the latter, but ate some of the stew out of courtesy.

For the next few years, the parents of the Indian boy would return once a year and sadly circle his grave on their horses each day that they camped in the area. But with the general removal of tribes not long after, the parents were never allowed to return to their son’s grave.

None of the settlers was able to recall the boy’s name years later.

The name of a young white child buried the following year was documented. Adna Phelps, the youngest son of the Phelps family, had begun ailing during the family’s wagon trek from New Hampshire.

Just after their arrival in the area, the 2 1/2-year-old child died. Residents told David and Anna Phelps about the Indian toddler buried on the mound, and they decided to bury their child next to the native boy.

Sandstone headstones with names and dates were erected for both the children.

Talking to Garber in the 1950s, Adna Phelps’ elderly great-nieces Cordelia Loose and Mary Leedy were able to share these stories. Cordelia added that she had identified the grave sites of the two children on the mound in 1923.

The sandstone markers were still there, though they had already become unreadable after more than a century of rain.

She could find no sign of the alleged chief’s burial atop the mound. Revisiting the site in 1929, she had been able to locate the graves again.

By her last check, in 1949, she could no longer find them, the stones having apparently been displaced by erosion or the walking over the rocks by farm animals kept on the mound.

Today the mound — which is on private property — is overgrown by trees, and should not be disturbed.

But it is worth remembering that the quiet farm site is also a sacred burial ground shared by natives and whites both.

This sacred usage suggests to me that even if it is a natural glacial structure, the mound’s symmetrical shape and location overlooking a river valley would have made it a sacred site for thousands of years — a true Indian mound.