5,000-year-old artifacts found on Charlotte farm

CHARLOTTE – Brooke Ellsworth's grandfather used to tell stories about the little stone pieces of history unearthed on the family farm.

Her great-grandfather Clyde Ellsworth would come in from a day of working the land on his Spicerville Highway property with the occasional find in hand — an arrowhead, stone pieces that looked like pendants, a hollow, long piece of what looked like a peace pipe.

"He would till them up when he was farming out there," she said.

Over the years those stone pieces were collected and tucked away.

It took Ellsworth just a few weeks after her grandmother's death in June to go through the keepsakes in her Springport home.

"She was kind of a clean hoarder," she said. "She didn't like to throw things away and she had so much stuff. There was still furniture from the 50s in the attic."

The stone pieces had been scattered throughout the house. Delicately carved arrowheads made of both light and dark chert, all shapes and sizes. A broken, oblong, hollow piece of a smoking pipe. Larger sharp, butterfly-shaped pieces of stone, probably tools, and smooth flat rocks with small holes in the center that might have adorned the necks of people alive thousands of years ago.

Late last year, all 120 of them were rediscovered in a dusty, cluttered attic — a collection that Ellsworth's grandmother Beverly hung on to for decades. Once gathered together they fit in a moderately-sized cardboard box.

It's a rare collection insofar as all of the pieces were pulled from the same 140 acres and kept together over the decades.

It's also solid proof that the Ellsworth family wasn't the first to make their home there. Groups of Native Americans have inhabited that open stretch of land between Charlotte and Eaton Rapids intermittently since before the ancient Egyptians built the Pyramids at Giza.

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A simple donation

Ellsworth and her father Chris made a decision.

The family would let the stones go, donate them to the Eaton Rapids Historical Society.

Deb Malewski, the historical society's vice president, got her first look at the artifacts in December. Within a day, she had convinced herself that the stones were special.

"If all this came from one farm, this is not your normal find," she said. "This isn't, somebody picks up an arrow head out in the farmer's field. This means something more than a causal find. This is too much and in too good of shape to just have been a random thing. This is a sign of some kind of settlement."

Enter Stacy Tchorzynski, an archaeologist with the Michigan State Historical Preservation Office and no stranger to significant finds.

"It's a great collection and we're only beginning to learn about it," said Tchorzynski.

The items are in good shape. Spear points, arrow heads, pestles used to grind spices and other items, banner stones used as weights on spears, knives, a smoking pipe and pendants were found on the farm.

"People of all ages and genders would have used a tool kit like this," Tchorzynski said.

More importantly, she added, the collection was kept together, not scattered among relatives.

That has allowed experts to date what's there. Some of the Ellsworth farm artifacts date back 350 years. Some of them date back 5,000 years.

Farm's rich back story

Clyde Ellsworth bought the 140-acre farm in 1937. The land has stayed in the family since.

The flat, vast, snow-covered property was once home to cows, chickens, pigs and sheep and to acres of corn, wheat and hay.

Today, one of Clyde's grandsons lives there in a one-story home. There are a few barns too, off the rural, snow-drifted roadway, along with rows of now-frozen corn stalks.

Most of the artifacts were found before the family used massive, efficient machinery to work the land, back when Clyde was still using horses to plow the fields. They popped up from the freshly tilled earth in the animals' lumbering wake.

"As my grandfather followed the horses, he would pick up the arrowheads," Brooke Ellsworth said.

It's easy to see why prehistoric people made their homes at site that is now the Ellsworth farm. People chose settlements then for the same reason they do today — location — and the farm was high ground between the Grand and Kalamazoo rivers.

"It looks like people were living there for several thousands of years on and off," said Tchorzynski. "People kept coming back and back over the years there."

And even something as inconsequential as trace amounts of burned food found inside a ceramic pot can give scientists important information about how they lived, said William Lovis, an anthropology professor at Michigan State University and a curator at the MSU Museum.

"It can be carbon dated," said Lovis. "Looking at the chemistry of the food can tell us what plants and animals are there. You can tell generally what they were cooking in the pot. That's all from a few milligrams of burned on food."

Native Americans living there 350 years ago during the Late Woodland period likely would have made pottery and grown corn, squash and beans, storing it to use later.

"These folks were actually very different from their ancestors," said Lovis. "They did not travel as much."

For the earlier groups, whose use of the site goes back 5,000 years ago to what's known as the Late Archaic period, it probably would have been more a stopping place than a settlement.

They were nomads, living in small groups, moving with the seasons and in search of food. They hadn't begun making pottery yet and relied on hunting and gathering to survive.

But when it comes what life was like for Native Americans that lived here long ago, experts don't actually know very much, Lovis said.

Preserving, learning more

The donation is a piece of the area's history, the 138th recorded historical site in the county, one of roughly 22,000 in the state.

The Eaton Rapids Historical Society wants to share and display it. A program focused on the artifacts will be offered this summer. The group will display the pieces at the historical Miller Farm.

"We really have something cool here," said Malewski. "Other counties have thousands of sites but very few are recorded here in Eaton County."

That may be because property owners aren't talking about what they find.

"People have found stuff," said Malewski. "They just haven't reported it to the state because they're afraid the state will take it away."

Which can happen in certain cases but doesn't usually, according to Matthew Fletcher, a Michigan State University law professor and the director of the Indigenous Law & Policy Center.

"In general, private property owners often can retain ownership over privately acquired Indian artifacts and materials," said Fletcher. "However, if the artifacts include eagle feathers or any eagle parts, and the owner is not a member of a federally recognized tribe, then the ownership is illegal under federal law."

Tchorzynski said her office does want to document finds and offer land owners help in preserving and keeping their collections together. Both efforts are key to helping experts learn more about the history of the places where they were found.

"Really the value of these sites can't be measured," she said. "Each site is its own unique story. These are things to treasure."

Ellsworth said her family had "no idea" the stones her great-grandfather found were valuable pieces of the area's history.

"I'm so glad that we decided to donate them," she said, "because we never would have known otherwise."

At a glance

The Spicerville Highway farm has been designated by the Michigan State Historical Preservation Office as the 138th recorded historical site in Eaton County.

There are 22,000 recorded historical sites on land in Michigan. Some were once Native American settlements. Others were pioneer homesteads or logging sites. Another 1,500 shipwrecks or underwater sites are on record.

Spear points, arrow heads, pestles used to grind spices and other items, banner stones used as weights on spears, knives, a smoking pipe, and pendants were found on the farm.

The items have led experts to believe that more than one group of prehistoric Native Americans lived on the land. Some of the 120 artifacts date back 350 years, while others date back as far as 5,000 years.

The farm was likely considered high ground between two viable water sources, the Grand and Kalamazoo rivers.