Pygmy Skeletons in Ohio

I have devoted much of my attention to the discoveries of diminutive skeletons in and around White County, Tennessee during the 1800s. Collectively known as the "Tennessee Pygmies," the tiny finds have their share of detractors, as well as a few folks such as myself that believe the mystery warrants a closer look. What most folks familiar with the subject may not realize is that small, or "pygmy skeletons," have been recovered elsewhere such as Kentucky and Ohio. Case in point, The Gentlemen’s Magazine ran this piece about a pygmy graveyard in the Antiquarian news section of their August 1837 issue:

A short distance from Cochocton [sic], Ohio, U.S., a singular ancient burying ground has lately been discovered. “It is situated,” says a writer in Silliman’s Journal, “On one of those elevated, gravelly alluvions, so common on the rivers of the West. From some remains of wood, still apparent in the earth around the bones, the bodies seem all to have been deposited in coffins; and what is still more curious, is the fact that the bodies buried here were generally not more than from three to four and a half feet in length. They are very numerous, and must have been tenants of a considerable city, or their numbers could not have been so great. A large number of graves have been opened, the inmates of which are all of this pigmy race. No metallic articles or utensils have yet been found to throw light on the period or the nations to which they belonged.

The Centennial History of Coshocton County, Ohio, published in 1909 wrote the following:

The earliest accounts speak of our mounds being regarded even in the Indian’s day as structures of remote antiquity. The missionary, Zeisberger, noted a hundred and thirty-three years ago the numerous signs of an ancient race here. He referred particularly to the cemetery containing thousands of graves near the mound three miles south of Coshocton.
The skeletons, reduced to chalky ashes, were three feet to four and a half feet long, smaller than Indian or mound skeletons. These pygmies have led to much conjecture. Thus far no definite conclusion is recorded in any of the notices of this ancient city of the dead. The bibliography of Ohio earthworks, prepared for the Smithsonian Institution, includes the notice in Howe’s Historical Collections, quoted from Dr. Hildreth’s description in Silliman’s Journal, 1835. This also mentions an ancient cemetery of pygmies near St. Louis. There the skeletons were found in stone sepulchers, while those here seemed to have been in wooden coffins. A discovery of pygmy graves on the Keene-Bethlehem township line is credited to J.C. Milligan. 

Hildreth relates that in one of the Coshocton graves was found a skeleton five and a half feet long, with decayed pieces of oak and iron nails. The skull was triangular in shape, much flattened at the sides and back, though not with the slant-brow of flat-head Indians seen in the West. A hole pierced the back of the skull. The bones were displaced, the skull being found with the pelvis, from which it is inferred that the body was dismembered before burial. In the St. Louis cemetery was found among the pygmies one skeleton of rather large development though not taller than the rest. The legs were cut off at the knees and placed alongside the thigh bones. 

Mitchener tells of the Nanticoke Indians in Maryland drying the bones of their dead and carrying them in wrappings from place to place as generation after generation sought new hunting grounds, and that eventually these ancestral bones found a final resting place in the valley at Coshocton when the last of the tribe became too weakened by war to move farther. This tradition is credited to a Nanticoke convert who was with Zeisberger, but it meets with that skepticism which has observed the uncertainty of Indian memory and how commonly Indian traditions die out, as for instance those southern tribes who retained no recollection whatever of De Soto’s expedition. In this connection also we are reminded of the Coshocton Indian tradition related to John Heckewelder, the other Moravian missionary here with Zeisberger. The Delawares, accounting for the ancient earthworks in this region, professed to him that their ancestors once occupied the country, but as Justin Winsor, librarian of Harvard University, said, it has been suspected that the worthy missionary was imposed upon. 

The long rows of graves of the pygmy race at Coshocton were regularly arranged with heads to the west, a circumstance which has given rise to the theory that these people were sun worshippers, facing the daily approach of the sun god over the eastern hills. In this respect, however, there is no resemblance to the various positions of skeletons found in our mounds. Acceptance of the sun-worship surmise does not necessarily imply a deduction that this pygmy race may have descended from the river-people of Hindostan or Egypt. Primeval man, wherever found, seems to have been a sun worshipper. 

The iron nails mentioned by Hildreth as found in this ancient cemetery take on added interest in view of the discovery in a mound near Cincinnati, reported by Frederick W. Putnam, curator of the Peabody Museum. Masses of meteoric iron were found on an altar, with bars of iron and other objects made from the metal. 

A statement appears in Graham’s History of Coshocton County that a Moravian minister from Pennsylvania visited the ancient cemetery here and remarked a custom among Moravians of burying the old in separate rows from the young. While this would explain the uniform smallness of some Moravian graves, it does not explain the absence from the missionaries' records of any considerable mortality among the younger or even for that matter the elder members of the Moravian mission. Moreover, the mission in this valley comprised but eight families, and they dwelt here only a few years. And finally, the Moravians themselves first spoke of the discovery here of the many pygmy graves.
The plow has long since turned these acres of mystery into cornfields, and obliterated this last vestige of a human population that once flourished within our borders. According to the view formulated from the missionary observations, unfortunately not accompanied by details covering excavations, this primitive people under stood the use of the stone ax, the making of pottery, and the division of land areas into squares. Nothing has been found to show whether it was their labor or that of others that erected the chain of earth works within our county. The thousands of graves point only to the conclusion that the country around was the seat of a large population. The activities of that strange race which peopled the wilderness, the story of elemental life in the shadows of the forest and along the shores of the rivers, until the end in that valley of eternal rest, remains untold.

   

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