Georgia Natural Wonder #66 - Macon (Part 1) - Bond Swamp/Ocmulgee Indian Mounds. 1285

[Top Row Dawg]

Georgia Natural Wonder #66 - Macon (Part 1) - Bond Swamp - Ocmulgee Indian Mounds

We covered the rapids of the Ocmulgee rapids yesterday for our main Natural Wonder of this area. We are going to tangent into the vast Indian history and present day mound sites along with the Bond Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, located 6 miles south of Macon, Georgia, Bond Swamp was established in 1989 to protect, maintain and enhance the forested wetland ecosystem of the Ocmulgee River floodplain. It opened to the public in 2000 and currently consists of 6,500 acres  situated along the fall line separating the Piedmont and Coastal Plains.



The refuge has a diversity of vegetation communities, including mixed hardwood-pine, bottomland hardwoods, tupelo gum swamp forests, creeks, tributaries, beaver swamps and oxbow lakes.



The refuge is rich in wildlife diversity including white-tailed deer, wood ducks, black bears, alligators, wild turkey, a nesting pair of bald eagles and excellent wintering habitat for waterfowl.


That’s right sucker’s - gators in Macon.

Extensive bottomland hardwoods provide critical habitat for neotropical songbirds of concern, such as Swainson's warbler, wood thrush, prothonotary warbler and yellow-billed cuckoo.


Prothonotary warbler

The combination of warm weather and wet areas at Bond Swamp provide ideal conditions for a variety of reptile and amphibian species.



The Ocmulgee River and its forests have been an important part of Macon's history and development. This region was important to Native Americans from Ice Age hunters to the Muscogee (Creeks) and Seminoles of historic times. Native Americans relied on the river and its surrounding forests for food, water, shelter and transportation for thousands of years before European settlers arrived in the area. When early European explorers and frontiersmen arrived, they traveled and traded along the river, and hunted and trapped in the forests along its banks. As European settlements in the area expanded, the forests were logged and mills operating along the river relied on it for both power and product transportation.


Stone Creek in Bond Swamp.

In recent years, the Macon area has experienced rapid development through residential and commercial expansion. To protect and manage the river corridor, concerned citizens along with local, state and federal government agencies initiated the Ocmulgee Heritage Greenway effort. Bond Swamp National Wildlife Refuge is an important link in the Ocmulgee Heritage Greenway, which is working to protect the Ocmulgee River and its rich resources. The proposed Greenway will create an integrated system of scenic, historic and recreational resources along the Ocmulgee River for the public's enjoyment. Bond Swamp National Wildlife Refuge fills a vital role along the Greenway by providing a place for the conservation and management of the fish, wildlife, and plants of the Ocmulgee River ecosystem.



Tangent: Oh man look what I discovered a bonus Macon Georgia Natural Wonder out here in the swamp. Brown’s Mount is a 189 acre ecological feature that rises steeply above the Ocmulgee River basin just south of the City of Macon, Georgia. It forms the northeast boundary of Bond Swamp National Wildlife Refuge and is managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. This tract re opened to public access in the summer of 2010. Questions about Browns Mount should be directed to the Refuge office at 478-986-5441.



History of Brown’s Mount

Brown’s Mount is named for its original owner George A. Brown. However the importance of this site to the region comes from its lengthy history of human occupation. The site was occupied ca. 950-1000 A.D. Brown’s Mount is a contributing property to the Ocmulgee Old Fields, a well-documented traditional cultural property associated with the Creeks. The Creeks established a number of towns on the Ocmulgee River in the late 17th century. Although these towns were abandoned by 1730s, the area continued to play an important role in Creek culture and trade. The Creeks were pushed from this land by English and American settlers by 1835.



In the early 1800’s Daniel and Nancy Moon Rogers lived here. Their family cemetery is still on the northeastern side of the Mount. In 1840’s Charles Lyell came to research and document the surrounding environments. In 1846, Lyell called Brown’s Mount a place of “great siliceous casts of fossil shells and corals… that belong to the Eocene Period.” The famous central Georgia poet, Harry Stillwell Edwards built a writing cabin on the Mount in 1918 calling it “Mt Talemeco”.


Edwards at desk

He is believed to have written the famous poem, “On the Mount”, from his cabin during the first World War as he listened to the soldiers below at the military training base, Camp Wheeler. His cabin burned down in the 1950’s but its chimney and foundation can still be seen on the top of the Mount.



Browns Mount was bought by Myrtle and Henry Simmons in 1938. Mrs. Simmons farmed the land until her husband died and then she sold the property to the Macon Museum of Arts and Science in 1993 with the understanding that it would be preserved and not commercialized.



The Georgia Department of Natural Resources, through the River Care Funding, purchased the property in 2000 and designated it as a Natural Heritage Preserve. Through a management agreement between the State of Georgia and the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service, 165 acres of Browns Mount became part of Bond Swamp National Wildlife Refuge in July 2006.



Past Bond Swamp and Browns Mount natural wonders on the Ocmulgee River south of Macon, there was a vast Indian history south of the city as well. So much so, that Macon was founded not so much as a Fall Line City on the Ocmulgee River, but more so from the US fort built there to deal with the Indians.

Early Inhabitants

Archaeologists have collected evidence of an unbroken chain of civilization in the Ocmulgee River basin dating from the Ice Age migration of humans across North America. Between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago, nomadic Paleoindian hunters moved southeastward across the continent into Georgia, leaving behind scraping tools and flint spearpoints in the Ocmulgee floodplain. Archaic hunter-gatherers in the river basin (ca. 8000-1000 B.C.) used a distinctive fiber-tempered pottery and different types of stone tools, where later earthen mounds and sherds of elaborately marked pottery mark the locations of Woodland Period villages (ca. 1000 B.C.-A.D. 900). Mississippian culture appears to have arrived at the Ocmulgee River basin around A.D. 900. On the Macon plateau and in the nearby Ocmulgee bottomlands, stretches of farmsteads and gardens constructed around elaborate ceremonial mounds are the most prominent evidence of this early Mississippian influence.



The Ocmulgee site consists of a large and impressive group of mounds located along the fall line of the Ocmulgee River on the northeastern edge of Macon. These include the Great Temple, other ceremonial mounds, and a burial mound. Although there were many different periods of occupation at what is now Ocmulgee National Monument, the most prominent one began around 800 A.D., in the Early Mississippian period (A.D. 800-1100), and lasted for three centuries. During that time the occupants, who had emigrated from Tennessee or farther west, built many flat-topped earthen mounds, council chambers, and defensive structures in the mile-square town. They represented highly skilled engineering techniques and soil knowledge, and the organization of many laborers.  Archaeologists know that they were immigrants because their pottery was completely different from that of the other people living in central Georgia at that time, but identical to pottery found on sites northwest of present-day Georgia.



Between 1933 and 1941 the largest archaeological excavations ever undertaken at any site in Georgia were carried out at Ocmulgee by Works Progress Administration, or WPA, workers who were guided by Arthur Kelly. Ocmulgee's 2,000 acres, in fact, made up the most extensive excavation in the country. The site had been badly damaged by two separate nineteenth-century railway cuts through the center of the town, but Kelly still recovered an incredible wealth of information about Mississippian Indian life in central Georgia. The crew discovered a unique and magnificent council house floor, and they built a protective roof over it.



This in-place archaeological exhibition is one of the most interesting and important in the entire eastern United States. The summit of the largest mound, at the southern end of the site, offers a stunning view of the Ocmulgee River valley to the south—a large flood plain where the Indians grew corn. The Ocmulgee site was abandoned by about 1100 A.D., and the fate of its inhabitants is still a mystery.



In 1934 the U.S. Congress designated 2,000 acres to be made a national park, but when ultimately signed into law in 1936 by U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt as a national monument, only 678 acres fell under federal protection. The site today consists of 702 acres. The monument designation includes the Lamar Mounds and Village Site, located downriver about three miles from Macon. In 1997 the Old Ocmulgee Fields was designated by the National Register of Historic Places as a Traditional Cultural Property, the first such site so named east of the Mississippi River. The Old Fields site is now endangered, however, because of Georgia Department of Transportation plans to construct a highway that would bisect the site.



Ocmulgee's visitor center includes an archaeology museum. It displays artifacts and interprets the successive cultures of the prehistoric Native Americans who inhabited this site, as well as the historic Muscogee and diverse peoples of the colonial era. The large park encompasses 702 acres, with 5 1⁄2 miles of walking trails. Near the visitor center is a reconstructed ceremonial earthlodge, based on a 1,000-year-old structure excavated by archeologists. Visitors can reach the Great Temple Mound via a half-mile walk or the park road. Other surviving prehistoric features in the park include a burial mound, platform mounds, and earthwork trenches.



During this period, an elite society supported by skillful farmers constructed a town. Leaders directed the complex construction of large, earthwork mounds, the central structures on the plateau.



Carrying earth by hand in bags, thousands of workers built the 55 ft.-high Great Temple Mound on a high bluff overlooking the floodplain of the Ocmulgee River. Magnetometer scans have revealed the platform mound had a spiraling staircase oriented toward the floodplain. The staircase is unique among any of the Mississippian-culture sites.



The people built rectangular wooden buildings to house certain religious ceremonies on the platform mounds. The mounds at Ocmulgee were unusual because they were constructed more distant from each other than was typical of other Mississippian complexes. Scholars believe this was to provide for public space and residences around the mounds.



Circular earth lodges were built to serve as places to conduct meetings and important ceremonies. Remains of one of the earth lodges were carbon dated to 1050 CE. This evidence was the basis for the reconstructed lodge which archeologists later built at the monument center.



The interior features a raised-earth platform, shaped like an eagle with a forked-eye motif. Molded seats on the platform were built for the leaders. The eagle was a symbol of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, which the people shared with other Mississippian cultures.



The historic site of the English colonial Ocumulgee trading post is also part of the park. The visitor center includes a short orientation film for the monument site and a gift shop.



The main section of Ocmulgee National Monument is accessible from U.S. Route 80, off Interstate 16 (which passes through the southwest edge of the monument land). It is open daily except Christmas Day and New Year's Day.

Lamar Phase

As the Mississippian culture declined at the ceremonial center, ca. 1350 a new culture coalesced among people who lived in the swamps downstream. The Late Mississippian period Lamar Phase people built two mounds that have survived, including a unique "spiral mound." They also had a village protected by a defensive palisade. This is now protected as the Lamar Mounds and Village Site.



Lamar pottery was distinctive, stamped with complex designs like pottery of the earlier Woodland peoples. It was unlike the pottery of the Macon Plateau culture. Many archaeologists believe the Lamar were related to the earlier Woodland inhabitants, who, after being displaced by the newer Mississippian culture migrants, developed a hybrid culture.


An example of Mississippian Lamar pottery, on display at the Ocmulgee Mounds Visitor Center in Macon.

The Lamar Mounds and Village Site is an isolated unit of the monument, located in the swamps about 3 miles south of Macon. The Lamar Site is open on a limited basis.



European Exploration

Europeans first reached the Ocmulgee River in 1540, when Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto's expedition came to Ichisi, a late Mississippian chiefdom that archaeologists now locate on the floodplain south of Macon. Historians and archeologists believe this was likely the Lamar site. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, the Indians who had fed De Soto's party on corncakes, wild onions, and roasted venison had been devastated by disease and social disruption and had disappeared from the region.



The Spaniards left a trail of destruction in their wake as they wandered throughout the present-day Southeastern U.S.  in a failed search for precious metals. Their deadliest legacy was likely related to the pigs they brought. Escaping, the pigs became feral and spread Eurasian infectious diseases to which American Indians had no acquired immunity. Fatalities were high, causing social dislocations and likely contributing to a collapse of the Mississippian cultures.



In the aftermath of De Soto's expedition, the Mississippian cultures disappeared. Hierarchical chiefdoms crumbled. They were replaced by loose confederacies of clans. The clans did not cultivate the agricultural surpluses which had supported the former population density. Agriculture had enabled the development of hierarchy in the larger population. Its leaders planned and directed the corvée labor system that raised and maintained the great earthen mounds.



By 1690 English traders from the Carolinas had established a post adjoining the "Okmulgee town" on the river's east bank, near present-day Macon. Spreading inland from Charles Town (later, Charleston), South Carolina, to the Ocmulgee region, the English found various settlements of loosely affiliated tribes. One group, the Hitchiti-speaking Okmulgees, lived in towns scattered between the Towaliga River and Walnut Creek. In the Hitchiti language Okmulgee means "where water boils up," and it was generally thought to have referred to the big springs at Indian Springs. The word first appears in Spanish accounts of an Apalachicola town on the Chattahoochee River, however, and some historians argue that it referred not to the river in central Georgia but to the waters of the Chattahoochee, from whose banks the Okmulgee Indians had migrated northeastward earlier in the seventeenth century. To the Okmulgees the river was known as Ochese-hatchee, or Ochese Creek, which in turn spawned the name that the English traders gave the confederation of tribes—the "Creek people" or Creeks.


Okmulgee Town is now in Oklahoma.

In the Yamasee War of 1715, Carolinian soldiers destroyed Okmulgee Town and drove out its inhabitants. When General James E. Oglethorpe founded the colony of Georgia in 1733, he managed, through negotiations with the Creek chiefs, to settle the immediate Georgia coast in relative peace. Yet Oglethorpe's Royal grant had proposed that colonial expansion could proceed inland as far as the Ocmulgee River, regardless of the Creeks' claims to the land, and although the whites' pressures to settle Georgia's interior abated somewhat, they never disappeared.



The Ocmulgee mounds evoked awe in early travelers. The Naturalist William Bartram journeyed through Ocmulgee in 1774 and 1776. He described the "wonderful remains of the power and grandeur of the ancients in this part of America." He was the first to record the Muscogee oral histories of the mounds' origins.



As the end of the Revolutionary War (1775-83) brought new overland migrations from Virginia and the Carolinas, the new state of Georgia obtained concessions to Creek tribal lands up to the Oconee River, and the U.S. government continued placing forts and trading houses in Creek territory bordering the Ocmulgee. The Lower Creek of Georgia initially had good relations with the federal government of the United States, based on the diplomacy of both Benjamin Hawkins, President George Washington's Indian agent, and the Muscogee Principal Chief Alexander McGillivray. The son of Sehoy, a Muscogee woman of the Wind Clan, and Lachlan McGillivray, a wealthy Scottish fur trader, Alexander McGillivray achieved influence both within the matrilineal tribe because of his mother's family, and among the Americans because of his father's position and wealth. He secured U.S. recognition of Muscogee and Seminole sovereignty by the Treaty of New York (1790). But, after the invention of the cotton gin in 1794 made cultivation of short-staple cotton more profitable, Georgians were eager to acquire Muscogee corn-fields of the uplands area to develop as cotton plantations; they began to encroach on the native territory.


Benjamin Hawkins.

Under government pressure in 1805, the Lower Creeks ceded their lands east of the Ocmulgee River to the state of Georgia, but they refused to surrender the sacred mounds. They retained a 3×5-mile-square area on the east bank called the Ocmulgee Old Fields Reserve. It included both the mounds on the Macon Plateau and the Lamar mounds. With the 1805 Treaty of Washington, the Ocmulgee River became the southwestern boundary of the United States. Present-day Macon, Georgia developed around the site after the United States built Fort Benjamin Hawkins nearby in 1806.



In 1806 the Jefferson administration ordered Fort Benjamin Hawkins built on a hill overlooking the mounds. The fort was of national and state military importance through 1821, used as a US Army command headquarters, and a supply depot for campaigns in the War of 1812 and later. Economically, it was important as a trading post or factory to regulate the Creek Nation's trade in deerskins. In addition, it served as a headquarters and mustering area for the Georgia state militia, so was a point of contact among the Creek Nation, the US, and the state of Georgia military and political representatives.


Fort Hawkins today.





Eighteenth-Century Settlers

Finally, in successive treaties signed at Indian Springs, the Creeks first ceded lands west of the Ocmulgee to the Flint River (1821), and then were forced to give up the rest of their lands in Georgia (1825).



In 1828, Andrew Jackson was elected president, and he supported Indian removal, signing legislation to that effect by Congress in 1830. Later he used US Army forces to remove the remnants of the Southeastern Indian tribes through the 1830s. The Creek, the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw and the Seminole were all removed to Indian Territory.



Following Indian Removal, the Muscogee reorganized in the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). In 1867 they founded a new capital, which they called Okmulgee in honor of their sacred mounds on the plateau of the Georgia fall line.


They also carry the Georgia Bulldog tradition!

Tomorrow we deep dive into Macon’s history on this Fall Line Georgia Natural Wonder. I am tweaking this re post with three GNW Gals.


Cherokee, Creek, and Choctaw Beauties.