Notes from my Knapsack 7-15-21

Notes from my Knapsack 7-15-21

Jeff Gill

Munson Springs flows with local history

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A tract of land north of the intersection of Newark-Granville Road and Cherry Valley Road is rich with history. We've seen new development nearby, but along with the Great Lawn of the Bryn Du Mansion, it's one of the last open stretches open for preservation on our village's eastern gateway, and there's reason to consider our doing so.

Full disclosure: I have been part of the discovery of this historical narrative, and I confess to some personal interest in how more people can become aware of what a hinge of history that intersection is, and can be. When I first moved to Licking County in August of 1989, I came with an archaeology degree in my background, and arrived just in time to attend a conference held by the Licking County Archaeology and Landmarks Society (LCALS), with speakers from National Geographic, Ohio State's faculty, and scholars from around the country.

That event got me introduced to Paul Hooge, the founder and executive director of LCALS, which had been doing summer field seasons with different archaeology programs including Ohio State on what was known as the Murphy tract. Soon I'd end up on the board of LCALS, but it was for only a few weeks later I would be invited to come help with the last day of that field season, which was going to be some site clean-up and the grunt work of backfilling and closing down a site for the winter.

There was snow in the air and a chill already on the ground when I showed up, and Paul introduced me to someone who would become a lifelong friend, Brad Lepper. He and I were assigned to cleaning off the sides of a unit dug to one side of a trench through a mound near what was already being called the Munson Springs, named for the farmstead at the heart of the Murphy tract. The house and barns still stood where now is the Glen at Erinwood, just east of Jones Road on the north side of Newark-Granville Road.

In another year, the Murphys would close down our work, and begin their intended development; along with facilitating some truly important archaeological digs, they would help with preserving the historic 1810 Munson home, which was moved a half mile east and across the road to become the core of the new Welsh Hills School. But the Munson Springs site had been given another year of work because in the previous year's site closure, an excavator had found a fluted point in the side of the trench.

Fluted points are relatively rare, and almost never found "in situ," in the ground where last they were left. Often in Licking or Coshocton Counties they are found in plowed fields after rains, knocked about and not necessarily located where they were deposited. They date to the first human occupation of this are, 10-13,000 years ago, just as the last glaciers were retreating north. Paleoindian hunters sought out mastodons and mammoths, elk and caribou, and of course deer, using wood and stone tools, the flint projectile points on their spears carefully crafted with a characteristic fluting flake off the base.

There are less than a dozen "in situ" fluted point finds in Ohio: one was within today's village limits, at the Munson Springs site. But this is only the beginning of the story!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he finds scraping and sifting soil to be therapeutic under the right circumstances. Tell him how you relax at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.