The Tomlinsons, Slavery in the Mid-Ohio Valley, and the Mystery of the Grave Creek Stone
Take a seat in the rocking chair of history with me, if you will.
Let me tell you the story of the mysterious Grave Creek Stone, the slave owners who found it, and why Moundsville sits at the center of this 170-year-old controversy.
We travel back to Colonial America, to the heart of the frontier along the Ohio River in western Virginia. English colonists and brothers Joseph, Samuel, and James Tomlinson slowly creep through the forest while hunting for the ever-present white-tailed deer. The year is 1770, and the slave-owning frontiersmen from Maryland are here to find a suitable site to settle down and bring their families. But, as they search for prey through the area's untouched hills and pristine waters, they come upon something rather unnatural. A 79-foot-tall mound of earth that was, unbeknown to them, built by peoples of the prehistoric Adena culture. Over a century, estimated to have spanned from 250-150 BCE, the society moved over 60,000 tons of earth to build their monument. It was the most prominent surviving mound among those made by the Adena across America. More on that later.
In 1772, after finding this unique landmark in the hills, the Tomlinson clan constructed a cabin roughly 300 feet from the mound. They were far beyond the settlement line imposed by the British in 1763. Because of this, they claimed land and more downriver of the Ohio using "Tomahawk rights," a recognized practice amongst early pioneers of establishing land ownership. They had recently been in the company of Colonel Ebenezer Zane when he founded what is now Wheeling in the winter of 1769, using the same tactic. However, the brothers ran into a bit of a snag when George Washington traveled and surveyed the Ohio river and claimed parts of the same land for himself. As a result, their original claim of more than 1,000 acres shrunk significantly. Still, they retained land in present-day Wood and Ohio counties at William's station and Grave Creek, respectively. Later that same year, the cabin was surrounded by a stockade barrier and dubbed Fort Tomlinson, which played a critical role in supplying and barracking revolutionary soldiers during the war. The fort would eventually be burned down by Native Americans, forcing the Tomlinsons out of their established settlement, only to return to it and have it rebuilt by 1785.
By 1804 Joseph Tomlinson (II) owned many human beings. He forced them to toil on his farms, take care of his family, and earn his living for him by harvesting cash crops. Two of them attempted an escape that same year from Williams station, one named Mike, raised amongst the Tomlinson children, and another whose name is lost to history. The Ohio River was more than a body of water for many enslaved people. Crossing it was a significant step on the path to freedom. During this time, a network of safe houses to aid those attempting the crossing was starting to form.
One of these houses belonged to a man named William Craig, who owned a farm along the banks of the Ohio about 30 miles upriver from Williams Station. They decided to commandeer a canoe at Williams station and make a quick paddle upriver to Craig's on one quiet night. No one saw them go, and Craig said they could stay there as long as they liked as free men. They felt safe enough there to be in the presence of the occasional visitors to the farm. Unfortunately, one of these visitors to the farm saw them and traveled back down to Williams Station, where Tomlinson happened to be that day, and got word about their whereabouts.
Tomlinson gathered his son Robert and three of his sons-in-law and headed up the river to retrieve their "stolen property." When Craig saw the enslavers coming, he shouted a warning to the two runaways, and they fled on foot. Unfortunately, Robert Tomlinson was fast on foot and caught up with Mike, knocking him to the ground with the butt of his rifle. The other runaway escaped on foot with his life. After a long struggle with Robert on the ground, a man he had known since childhood, Mike stabbed and killed Robert with a knife he carried on his belt. The others in Tomlinson's company subsequently captured and tied Mike to one of their horses and started back by land to Williams station. One night while camped by a stream on their way back, a fire was lit, and the men gathered around and executed Mike. His flesh and bones were left unburied and scattered about the camped area. Witnesses at the same campsite saw what took place and reported the murder to county officials. After a coroner found Mike in Ohio and other witness accounts were gathered, the governor of Ohio tried to extradite Tomlinson to stand trial, but the Virginia governor denied the request.
The heinous murder of 1804 reinforced the need for a more secure and safe way of transporting runaway slaves to freedom in the north. In the words of Hampton University scholar Henry Robert Burke "..in the very early days of slavery in the Mid-Ohio River Valley, tragedy needlessly struck down two young men before they had even begun to experience life. The deaths of the two young Americans signaled the beginning of Ohio's Underground Railroad".
Neither underground nor a railroad, these routes were made up of abolitionist activists loosely connected by the same goal of helping enslaved men and women to their freedom in the north. Quakers in Pennsylvania and North Carolina organized such routes and safe houses for years before. Still, the practice had just started to gain a foothold along the Ohio river when Craig let the two men stay at his farm. The Ohio River valley became one of the most important symbols in the history of race in nineteenth-century America. A fact that isn't readily taught in a state that too often ignores its pre-statehood history and slavery in general. In his 2013 book Race, Slavery, and Freedom in the Ohio River Valley during the Civil War Era, author Jonathan White writes, "For decades southern slaves set their sights on its shores, hoping to cross onto the free soil on the other side. Harriet Beecher Stowe was inspired to write the most important novel of the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom's Cabin, after reading about the harrowing escape of a slave woman and her child who had scrambled across large chunks of floating ice to gain their freedom on the north shore. Dred Scott's landmark case began in St. Louis, just north of where the Ohio meets the Mississippi. And the Ohio River helped shape a young Abraham Lincoln's views of race and slavery. One night while traveling down the Ohio in a steamboat in 1841, Lincoln observed a dozen slaves "shackled together with irons" being transported from Kentucky to the Deep South to be sold. The injustice of that scene "was a continual torment to me" that still had "the power of making me miserable," he wrote fourteen years later, "and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio or any other slave-border,"
The 277 miles long, natural, twisting border of Virginia was the freedom line for many enslaved peoples of the day. The rough mountainous terrain and swift rivers made it hard for slave patrolmen to pursue them across the Appalachian mountains and harder for those trying to escape. A majority of crossings of the Ohio were done in winter so those heading north could hop across the ice instead of facing the swift currents. When waiting for winter was not an option, they would often commandeer canoes, as Mike and his companion had. Though the Underground Railroad's history is surrounded by ambiguity due to the clandestine nature of their efforts, many runaway slaves used the border between pre-statehood West Virginia and Ohio as a primary source of escape. Even when they did make it across the expanse of the Ohio, life wouldn't be easy for them. With the ever-present fear of re-enslavement, freedmen had to be on their toes and could be sent back for even the slightest infraction of the law or being in debt.
Although the rest of Tomlinson's slaves were emancipated in 1835 after the death of his granddaughter Elizabeth Henderson, unfortunately, this history isn't widely known or perhaps not given much thought. As recently as 2014 the family that founded the city is still recognized and celebrated as heroes of the revolutionary war and great early statesmen of western Virginia.
The mound at the center of the settlement called Elizabethtown (later to become Moundsville) was the most prominent area feature along the river. So much so that even Merriweather Lewis found it noteworthy. He wrote in his journal about the "remarkable artificial mound" on his journey Westward to meet up with William Clark to begin their myth-making expedition to the Pacific coast. The ancient mammoth mound of earth would become the epicenter of controversy and intrigue when in 1838, a writer under the pen name of H.E.D. & Co. wrote in a local newspaper, "Our negligence with regard to the excavation of our Mammoth Mound, has called down the censure and reprobation of the enlightened of every community wherever the knowledge of the 'Great Mound at Grave Creek' existed. Long has the scientific world gazed with an eager eye for its excavation…Awake! Awake! Then citizens, let us rally our full force. Roll in your mite, the undertaking is pregnant with the most glorious results."
A meeting was held amongst the townspeople about this stirring proposal. They considered its attractiveness as a profitable tourist destination for the town and to the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company, which was actively looking for a place to cross the Ohio River. In the end, $2,500 was raised for a dig. The mound and the surrounding land were still in possession of the Tomlinson family at the time, under the tutelage of Jessee, son of Joseph. Jessee reluctantly agreed to the excavation and tapped his nephew Abelard Tomlinson and his brother-in-law Thomas Biggs to take charge of the project. Their archeological prowess could best be described as amateur. Still, it kept a lot of the work within the founding family’s orbit. The month following the meeting of the townspeople, excavation of the mound began.
Abelard and company began by cutting down a white oak on the top of the mound estimated to be around 500 years old. They then positioned themselves with picks and shovels on the north face of the rise and created a tunnel towards the center, ten feet wide and seven feet high. After digging horizontally for a distance of 111 feet from the spot they started, they ran into a burial vault. A vertical shaft was then sunk from the top of the mound to meet up with the horizontal tunnel. In the process of making this vertical tunnel, a second burial vault was uncovered.
The original vision of the project was to find out what was inside, and if interesting, the Tomlinsons would “build a staircase up the middle and establish a gentle ‘toll’ upon the curious.” In other words, create a profitable museum on their property. They executed this plan and included in the construction a 3-story building atop the mound in which patrons would leave the exhibit and be able to enjoy the views it afforded from the top. Unfortunately, the museum was poorly constructed, and the displayed artifacts left in the open and without much security. In the end, the museum portion was abandoned by the Tomlinsons in 1846. There were not enough tourists in those days to justify the expenses of keeping up with the exhibit. Instead, the infrastructure was left to the elements and free to roam for peoples and animals alike.
Inside the vaults, the excavators found human skeletons, copper rings, bracelets, plates of mica, ivory beads, and ornaments. Among these various trinkets was also found a small flat inscribed tablet of sandstone. This tablet would become the famous Grave Creek Stone that is still to this day mired in controversy and intrigue.
Although accounts differ on who found the stone, most agree that it was seen as the laborers excavated and got into the upper vault. Abelard claimed to have found and pulled out the rock from its ancient bed himself. Other workers on-site similarly claimed to have found the stone, and others insist it was pulled from a wheelbarrow of dirt taken from the digging.
The confusion about the stone’s origins lay in what is inscribed on it. Tomlinson initially thought they were simple Native American hieroglyphics. Five years after its discovery, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, a distinguished Ethnologist at the time, was the first to subject it to critical examination and analysis. He became convinced that the stone had ancient Spanish or British origins. The tablet depicted many characters from ancient languages, including Greek, Norse Runic, and Hebrew, among others. At the time of its analysis, the racist notion that uncivilized Native Americans could not have produced such intricate work took root amongst archaeologists and historians. It was thought that the tablet and the characters written on it might prove the existence of European settlers before 1492, the year Columbus landed in North America. If what Schoolcraft was reporting was true, it would represent the first concrete evidence of written language in pre-European America. Akin to the rosetta stone in terms of understanding ancient cultures.
However, controversy also swirled around the authenticity of the tablet and whether it was found there or forged and placed on site. The problem cropped up during the initial excavation. Dr. S.G. Morton was finishing up his academic work entitled Crania Americana, devoted to the skulls of ancient men in America. Hearing about the mound project and what it might unearth, he asked his friend Dr. James W. Clemings, a respected Wheeling physician, to go down and report on any ancient skulls within. After four months on-site during the excavation, Clemings reported back about “... a curiously inscribed, or hieroglyphic stone, the characters of which are distinctly traced in parallel lines. These curiosities were all found together near the skeleton”. This is the earliest known written account of the tablet. However, this discovery was never published in Crania Americana, perhaps because Morton knew it wouldn’t survive the scrutiny of the broader archaeological field. This fact was brought up years later when the stone was undergoing critical analysis by Ephraim Squier, another archaeologist of the day. He argued that the omission in the book and the daily reports of the excavation was unprecedented. He further argued that since “the mound was opened as a speculation, the success of which depended upon the more or less extraordinary character of the remains;” that as an inscription “in an unknown character, is not found every day, it is an ‘immense attraction’.”
Because Clemens was the first to write any mention of the stone, he became the main focus of its authenticity. Clemens was a man of means and had a passion for poetry, collecting books, and public speaking. When looking back and comparing some of Clemen’s writings against that of the newspaper article calling for the excavation, there is evidence that it was he who authored the article which convinced the Tomlinsons to agree to the excavation. The $2,500 raised for the excavation was actually borrowed by Clemens to bankroll the operation. He would be frustrated and indebted further if nothing of significance was found in the mound. In recent years, anthropologist David Oestreicher dug deep into the topic. He discovered the potential source of the inscriptions on the tablet. It comes from an 18th-century book on “unknown letters that are found in the most ancient coins and monuments of Spain. According to Oestreicher, “everything on the stone,” including “impossible sequences of characters with the same mistakes,” can be found in this book. Since Clemens was known to have an extensive private collection of books, it is not unreasonable to think he had a copy. He would have been looking for an opportunity to recoup the money spent on the dig—a convincing argument for the forgery and placement of the stone.
Although Oestreicher has presented the most convincing argument about the stone’s origins, it is still not conclusively known or agreed upon where it came from. The location of the actual stone has been lost since the late 19th century. Still, the Smithsonian does have numerous casts of it from when it was previously sent there for study.
What do you think? Was it an authentic piece of ancient writing or a greedy forgery?
