Following the Batesville Mounds site as it buds into an archeological and cultural attraction on Highway 35 North has been an interesting journey.
My generation and many before it grew up aware of the mounds alongside Highway 35 because the land around the mounds was then farmed and open to view.
(The original route of Highway 51 — before the present route was completed in 1936 — ran through the property between the mounds and the river, but that’s a story for another day.)
When it was no longer farmed, roadside brush and trees grew into a foliage screen that hid the mounds. Without us realizing it, several generations that followed were largely unaware of the Mounds presence. I think that the collective loss was this: that every time anyone ever gazed on those mounds as they passed, they had to think — if only for a brief moment — about who built them. Who were those people?
The recorded curiosity about who built the mounds and lived in the villages surrounding them dates back at least to 1847. Before that, even the Chickasaws who occupied this country until it was treaty-wrested from them probably wondered as well, because the most recent archeological study in 1992 estimated its period of occupancy from 500 B.C. to 300 A.D.
The Mounds were part of the W. M. Harmon property purchased in the 1980s for construction of the industrial complex on the south side of Highway 35. The Mounds property on the north side of Highway 35 was off limits to development because of its archeological significance. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988. But by then, a generation of local folks had become adults without ever having laid eyes on them.
Subsequent recent developments, including the Mississippi Department of Transportation fast-tracking the site to be included on the Mississippi Mounds Trail and the donation from its former owner, the Panola Industrial Development Authority, to the City have resulted in the roadside foliage screen having been cleared away to make them again visible to highway passersby.
Since then we have heard from many people, some even astonished, who had never seen the mounds nor known they were there. Imaginations have again been stimulated to wonder about those people whom archeologists have classified as “Middle Woodlands.”
The City is applying for a grant to help make the site more accessible to visitors, spurred by Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) Chief Archeologist Pam Lieb’s prediction that the Batesville Mounds site will become the most visited site on the Mississippi Mounds Trail because of its proximity to Interstate 55 less than a quarter of a mile away.
As Boy Scout Troop 478 leader Smith Murphey observed, “There are larger, more spectacular mounds, but none are located next to an interstate.”
Which brings me to the role that local Boy Scout interest had played in making this site more accessible to the rest of us. During the last several years as the city’s interest in gaining ownership coincided with the Mounds Trail designation and the increasing public curiosity about the site, there has been occasional tension between the Scouts and city leaders.
City leaders have approached its development slowly and cautiously to make sure that whatever decisions they make about the site don’t violate MDAH protocols and knock them out of whatever grants might be available to assist in funding.
Scout leaders, on the other hand, have been encouraging their older boys to Eagle rank before their 18th birthday deadline, so months mean much at this point in their lives. Productive tension resulted, prompting the mayor and aldermen to move more quickly than they might have otherwise.
Trails are being laid through the property and bridge construction is pending, built by scouts as their Eagle projects.
Last weekend, Judge Murphey and three other scout leaders — Doug Hudson, Johnny Pace and Billy Broome –– along with a gaggle young scouts, spent two nights camping there, the latest in a series of camping trips that local scouts have made there since Fall, 2014. (Photos page1A, 2A)
What must they have thought during those nights as the 21st Century sounds of nearby traffic blended with the sounds heard by those people who slept on the same ground so many centuries ago?