Author Denver Michaels

Few who visit the vacation hub of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, realize that there is an old Indian mound alongside the busy highway. The mound , known as the McMahan Mound, gets lost among the sprawling strip malls and hotels. The McMahan Mound sits on the bank of the west fork of the Little Pigeon River in downtown Sevierville, Tennessee. In my travels to various mound sites throughout the country, one commonality is that mounds are always situated near a good water source. This was a necessity so that the builders could wet the earth and firmly pack it down. According to a Wikipedia entry, the McMahan Indian Mound: …consists of a 16 feet (5 m) high and 240 feet (73 m) wide platform mound, with a large associated village surrounded by a palisade. It was occupied by Dallas Phase peoples of the South Appalachian Mississippian culture between 1200 and 1500 CE. At the time when the ancient mound was first investigated scientifically in 1881 by a party associated with the Smithsonian Instit...

In today’s blog post, I thought I would share this account from 1880 of nine-foot giants in Ohio. Of equal interest to the giant discoveries is a sandstone tablet found among the burials with “two lines of hieroglyphs” inscribed upon it. I have written at length in the past of excavators finding strange tablets inside of mounds containing giant bones. The Marion Daily Star told the story of the tablet and enormous skeletal remains found in a mound in Ohio : MARION DAILY STAR , JULY 14, 1880 REMAINS OF NINE-FOOT GIANTS IN OHIO A correspondent of the Cincinnati Enquirer, writing about the remains of a giant race found in Muskingum County, Ohio, says: The mound in which these remarkable discoveries were made was about sixty-four feet long and thirty-five feet wide top measurement and gently sloped down to the hill where it was situated. A number of stumps of trees were found on the slope standing in two rows, and on the top of the mound were an oak and a hickory stump, all of...