WHITESIDE COUNTY. 165 



common manure, the whole mass becomes sweetened, and one of the 

 best and strongest fertilizers for farm crops is produced. The orchard, 

 the vine, and the garden fruits feed greedily upon this compound, and 

 bear abundant crops. 



When necessity compels our prairie farmers to turn their attention to 

 fertilizers, these unripe peat beds will become the most valuable spots 

 on every farm. Tracts of sterile land in Maryland, worth but four or 

 five dollars an acre, suddenly increased in value to forty dollars an acre, 

 upon the discovery in their neighborhood of the wonderful fertilizer, the 

 n mails of Maryland and New Jersey. A peat bed is not only valu- 

 able itself, but will eventually confer a new value upon all adjoining 

 lands, if properly u.-ed. 



Clay*. Sunrts and Soils. Further remarks upon the clays, sands, and 

 soils of this county, and their products, seem hardy necessary. The 

 discussion upon these topics in the Ogle county report might be applied 

 with nearly equal truth to this county. 



Antiquities. 



I cannot close this report without referring briefly to the antiquities 

 left by the mound builders. Near the Niagara limestone quarries above 

 the city of Sterling, on a high table land overlooking "Rock river, from 

 the north bank, is a large congregation of these mounds. Along the 

 south bank of the river, below the city, many large ones are scattered 

 along. Most of these Sterling mounds are the common round ones. 

 Their size is a little larger than the average. A few oblong ones were 

 noticed, but none of the strange effigies and mystic representations ob- 

 served at some other localities. Mounds also exist about Portland, and 

 many other places along Rock river. 



Many of these mounds have been partially excavated, and some 

 trinkets and pieces of charcoal taken therefrom. 



These are commonly believed to be burial mounds; but there is reason 

 to think that many of them are house mounds, or hut mounds, made by 

 covering some sort of supporting structures with sods or surface earth, 

 for winter residences of extinct races of men. The charcoal found in 

 them would indicate the fires once kindled, perhaps, in the center of these 

 low, earth-covered huts. The fact that the mounds are composed of 

 surface soil, with no depression near them, indicates that the materials 

 of which they are composed were gathered from the surface of the earth. 

 Later generations have doubtless used these structures as places of in- 

 terment for their dead. Whether used as human habitations, burial 

 mounds, memorial or sacrificial monuments; whether built by the In- 

 dian tribes, or races of men older than they, may remain a mooted ques- 



