THE NEW ALBIN INSCRIBED TABLET 
ELLISON ORR 
During the summer of 1915, workmen, in excavating for a 
cellar under the residence of Mr. August Welper, of New Albin, 
Iowa, discovered a catlinite (pipe stone) tablet with pictographs 
inscribed on both obverse and reverse sides, and the purpose of 
this paper is to set out briefly the data connected therewith. 
New Albin is built on an extensive terrace of sand and gravel, 
outwash from the glacier of the Wisconsin Ice Sheet — lying 
along the bluffs on the Iowa side of the Mississippi river, and 
extending from the state line between Iowa and Minnesota on the 
north, down the river to the mouth of the Oneota or Little Iowa 
River on the south. The terrace has a length of about one and 
one-half miles and an average width of approximately one-half 
mile. 
This terrace or “Bench,” as it is locally called, has an elevation 
above the present flood plain of the river of from 40 to 50 feet 
and is simply an immense sand-bar of the old river, now covered 
with a foot or two of black sandy loam, and with heavy deposits 
of loess along and drifted against the foot of the bluffs. 
It is an ideal town site, and evidently appealed to the Indian 
as such as well as to his white successors. 
While the digging for the Welper cellar was being done, one 
side caved in, and when the earth and sand was cleared away 
the tablet was found in it. 
It was impossible to tell at just what depth it originally lay, 
but from where it was found in the cave-in, with reference to 
the surface soil, the workmen concluded it originally lay about 
three feet below the surface. 
No bones, charcoal, pottery or other relics of any kind were 
found with it, which would lead to the conclusion that it might 
have been cached there for safe keeping and that its owner had 
died or possibly had been killed or driven away in war and all 
knowledge of its location lost. 
Similar cases are the cache of a celt and fine spud found in 
1911 in a bank beside the road near the May residence on the 
O’Reagan “Bench” on the Oneota, and that of a couple of pairs 
of arrow-shaft smoothers and a number, of mortars, grinding 
