Fort Ancient. 9 1 



paid considerable attention to the wearing of earth, say it could 

 not have happened in less than one thousand years. The only 

 estimate that seems to me to he accurate is that of about nine 

 hundred years for the age of the structure. 



The estimates given by others of from two to three thousand 

 years, it seems to me are entirely out of proportion. I wish it 

 understood by the reader, that this estimate as to the age, although 

 made very carefully, is purely conjectural, and I may be as badly 

 mistaken in giving this as any of my fellow scientists. There is 

 one date as to the finding of a skeleton that can be placed with 

 considerable certainty. In the center of the Old Fort there is an 

 enormous stump six feet five inches in diameter. This is the stump 

 of a walnut tree which was cut just twenty years ago. I found the 

 man who cut the tree down, and held an interview with him. He 

 was old Mr. Hughes, a farmer who had lived in the neighborhood 

 of Fort Ancient since he was twenty years old, and he is now 

 eighty-seven. He says that in 1820, when he first saw that tree, it 

 was as large, as he remembered it, as it was the day it was cut 

 down. That it was the most beautiful tree in the entire fortifica- 

 tion. The rings on the stump, as counted by himself, indicated 

 an age of from three hundred and forty-rive to three hundred and 

 fifty years. Adding to this the twenty years since it was cut gives 

 us three hundred and seventy years. Several competent botanists 

 examined this stump, and said that while the tree might not be 

 three hundred and seventy years old, it could not be less than 

 three hundred and twenty, so that I have given three hundred 

 years in order to be perfectly safe as an estimate of the age of this 

 tree. Underneath the roots of this tree there was a stone grave in 

 which there was a decomposed skeleton. The roots of the tree 

 grew over the stones, not under them, showing that the grave was 

 placed there long before the tree grew. 



This gives us a clew to the age of the grave — that it was three 

 hundred years old anyway, and perhaps older. This would prove 

 that the grave could not be that of a simple Indian, as the 

 Shawnees did not come into the Ohio Valley until the year 1690. 

 The reason I give this illustration, is because a great many have 

 claimed that these stone graves are Shawnee, and are not am lent. 



In conclusion, let me make a plea for the preservation of this great 

 structure. The Serpent Mound in Adams County was bought and 

 preserved by Harvard College. Fort Ancient is surely as interest- 



