CHARLESTON, W.Va. - The two-inch, oval-shaped Grave Creek Stone has been a source of controversy almost since the time it was discovered in the lower chamber of Moundsville's Grave Creek Mound when it was first opened 170 years ago.
To all appearances, Dr. James W. Clemens seemed to have been at the top of his game in 1838 Wheeling.
A prominent physician who saved lives and served on the city council, he was a master orator, a poet and a man of letters with a personal library of more than 600 volumes. When William Henry Harrison, Daniel Webster and Henry Clay came to town, it was Clemens who gave the welcoming speech.
With a thriving medical practice, a wife and three children - one of whom would become a U.S. congressman and argue against secession - Clemens seemed to have it all.
The Grave Creek Mound, built more than 2,000 years ago by Adena Indians, did not contain the riches hoped for by the speculators who opened it in 1838. Photo courtesy of Marshall County Tourism Center
But he wanted more, according to anthropologist David Oestreicher, the main speaker at the West Virginia Archeological Society's annual meeting in Charleston on Saturday.
"Clemens wanted to have made a lasting contribution," said Oestreicher, one that would take its place in the annals of science and history.
To achieve that end, and to attempt to elude financial ruin, according to Oestreicher, Clemens perpetrated a fraud and set the stage for what would become perhaps West Virginia's greatest archeological puzzle: Who created the 22 hieroglyph-like characters inscribed on the Grave Creek Stone and why?
The two-inch, oval-shaped Grave Creek Stone has been a source of controversy almost since the time it was discovered in the lower chamber of Moundsville's Grave Creek Mound when it was first opened 170 years ago.
While some scientists of the era argued that it was a tablet bearing writing produced by a civilization that predated the Adena Indians who built the huge mound more than 2,100 years ago, others insisted it was a hoax.
The debate sizzled into and through the 20th century, but in recent decades, archeologists have generally concurred that the stone is a fraud. The main questions remaining about the stone are who carved it and placed it in the mound, and for what purpose? And where is the stone now?
Oestreicher, who holds a Ph.D. from Rutgers, played a key role 15 years ago in determining what is now generally accepted to be the fraudulent nature of the Walam Olum, the migration legend of the Delaware Indians purportedly translated in the 1830s from a series of carved sticks that later disappeared. He is now convinced he knows the answer to the puzzle surrounding the Grave Creek Stone.
Two key players in the Walam Olum controversy were also on opposite sides in the dispute over the authenticity of the Grave Creek Stone, piquing Oestreicher's interest in the West Virginia affair, which flared up at about the same time.
One of the earliest and loudest skeptics regarding the Walam Olum was scholar, explorer and former federal Indian agent Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who became an early and ardent supporter of the authenticity of the Grave Creek Stone. One of the earliest and loudest boosters of the Walum Olum was archeologist Ephraim Squier, who turned out to be one of the Grave Creek Stone's earliest and sharpest critics.
One reason for Squier's contention that the stone was a fraud was the fact that the sole first-hand, day-by-day published account of the mound's opening failed to mention anything about the stone's discovery. That account turned out to have been written by Clemens.
But years after the mound was opened, it was discovered that "Clemens' account of the stone's discovery had been edited out" of the book in which it appeared, Oestreicher said. When the anthropologist came across an unabridged text of Clemens' original story, he found that it made glowing mention of the find and its potential importance.
Squire's mention of Clemens in connection with the Grave Creek Stone prompted Oestreicher to focus his attention onto the Wheeling doctor.
Despite his many successes in life, Clemens "was not entirely happy," said Oestreicher. "He became obsessed with the Grave Creek Mound," he said, and was convinced that its interior held untold treasures and antiquities from an ancient civilization, in addition to thousands of skeletons.
The Tomlinson family owned the mound and the land surrounding it since 1774, and had always forbidden anyone from digging into the Adena structure, Oestreicher said. Descendent Jesse Tomlinson kept that tradition intact until 1838, when, suddenly, he agreed to sign a contract with three relatives and a man named Thomas Biggs to open the mound and share the proceeds from any treasures found inside.
Excavation of the mound would be a major undertaking, involving crews of workmen, teams of draft animals, and thousands of dollars.
While doing research in the Marshall County Clerk's Office, Oestreicher discovered records showing that Clemens had borrowed, in the months immediately preceding and following the beginning of the mound's excavation, nearly $2,600 - a not-so-small fortune for that era.
Ten days after the Tomlinsons signed the contract establishing how they would share the bounty found inside the mound, an article was published in the Marshall County Sentinel. Written in flowery text, the article gushed about the riches to be found in the mound, and urged readers to invest in the opening of the mound.
While only brief excerpts from the article had been mentioned in previous research regarding the stone, Oestreicher asked Harold Forbes at West Virginia University Library for help in locating the complete article. Forbes eventually found it, giving the anthropologist a more complete look at a thinly disguised sales pitch for investors.
"Long has the scientific world gazed with an eager eye for its excavation," the article stated breathlessly, predicting that the Adena monument would turn out to contain "relics which would establish without a doubt a wonder of the world" equal to the Great Pyramids of Egypt.
The article suggested the mound would produce evidence of a race that preceded the Native Americans of the region, and concluded that a museum exhibiting treasures and antiquities from the earthwork would become a global tourist attraction. Its drawing power would be so strong, it would cause wealth from Europe to "pour in torrents" into Moundsville, as well as "induce the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to select this spot" for new rail service.
The article was signed "H.E.D. & Co."
To all appearances, Dr. James W. Clemens seemed to have been at the top of his game in 1838 Wheeling.
A prominent physician who saved lives and served on the city council, he was a master orator, a poet and a man of letters with a personal library of more than 600 volumes. When William Henry Harrison, Daniel Webster and Henry Clay came to town, it was Clemens who gave the welcoming speech.
With a thriving medical practice, a wife and three children - one of whom would become a U.S. congressman and argue against secession - Clemens seemed to have it all.
But he wanted more, according to anthropologist David Oestreicher, the main speaker at the West Virginia Archeological Society's annual meeting in Charleston on Saturday.
"Clemens wanted to have made a lasting contribution," said Oestreicher, one that would take its place in the annals of science and history.
To achieve that end, and to attempt to elude financial ruin, according to Oestreicher, Clemens perpetrated a fraud and set the stage for what would become perhaps West Virginia's greatest archeological puzzle: Who created the 22 hieroglyph-like characters inscribed on the Grave Creek Stone and why?
The two-inch, oval-shaped Grave Creek Stone has been a source of controversy almost since the time it was discovered in the lower chamber of Moundsville's Grave Creek Mound when it was first opened 170 years ago.
While some scientists of the era argued that it was a tablet bearing writing produced by a civilization that predated the Adena Indians who built the huge mound more than 2,100 years ago, others insisted it was a hoax.
The debate sizzled into and through the 20th century, but in recent decades, archeologists have generally concurred that the stone is a fraud. The main questions remaining about the stone are who carved it and placed it in the mound, and for what purpose? And where is the stone now?
Oestreicher, who holds a Ph.D. from Rutgers, played a key role 15 years ago in determining what is now generally accepted to be the fraudulent nature of the Walam Olum, the migration legend of the Delaware Indians purportedly translated in the 1830s from a series of carved sticks that later disappeared. He is now convinced he knows the answer to the puzzle surrounding the Grave Creek Stone.
Two key players in the Walam Olum controversy were also on opposite sides in the dispute over the authenticity of the Grave Creek Stone, piquing Oestreicher's interest in the West Virginia affair, which flared up at about the same time.
One of the earliest and loudest skeptics regarding the Walam Olum was scholar, explorer and former federal Indian agent Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who became an early and ardent supporter of the authenticity of the Grave Creek Stone. One of the earliest and loudest boosters of the Walum Olum was archeologist Ephraim Squier, who turned out to be one of the Grave Creek Stone's earliest and sharpest critics.
One reason for Squier's contention that the stone was a fraud was the fact that the sole first-hand, day-by-day published account of the mound's opening failed to mention anything about the stone's discovery. That account turned out to have been written by Clemens.
But years after the mound was opened, it was discovered that "Clemens' account of the stone's discovery had been edited out" of the book in which it appeared, Oestreicher said. When the anthropologist came across an unabridged text of Clemens' original story, he found that it made glowing mention of the find and its potential importance.
Squire's mention of Clemens in connection with the Grave Creek Stone prompted Oestreicher to focus his attention onto the Wheeling doctor.
Despite his many successes in life, Clemens "was not entirely happy," said Oestreicher. "He became obsessed with the Grave Creek Mound," he said, and was convinced that its interior held untold treasures and antiquities from an ancient civilization, in addition to thousands of skeletons.
The Tomlinson family owned the mound and the land surrounding it since 1774, and had always forbidden anyone from digging into the Adena structure, Oestreicher said. Descendent Jesse Tomlinson kept that tradition intact until 1838, when, suddenly, he agreed to sign a contract with three relatives and a man named Thomas Biggs to open the mound and share the proceeds from any treasures found inside.
Excavation of the mound would be a major undertaking, involving crews of workmen, teams of draft animals, and thousands of dollars.
While doing research in the Marshall County Clerk's Office, Oestreicher discovered records showing that Clemens had borrowed, in the months immediately preceding and following the beginning of the mound's excavation, nearly $2,600 - a not-so-small fortune for that era.
Ten days after the Tomlinsons signed the contract establishing how they would share the bounty found inside the mound, an article was published in the Marshall County Sentinel. Written in flowery text, the article gushed about the riches to be found in the mound, and urged readers to invest in the opening of the mound.
While only brief excerpts from the article had been mentioned in previous research regarding the stone, Oestreicher asked Harold Forbes at West Virginia University Library for help in locating the complete article. Forbes eventually found it, giving the anthropologist a more complete look at a thinly disguised sales pitch for investors.
"Long has the scientific world gazed with an eager eye for its excavation," the article stated breathlessly, predicting that the Adena monument would turn out to contain "relics which would establish without a doubt a wonder of the world" equal to the Great Pyramids of Egypt.
The article suggested the mound would produce evidence of a race that preceded the Native Americans of the region, and concluded that a museum exhibiting treasures and antiquities from the earthwork would become a global tourist attraction. Its drawing power would be so strong, it would cause wealth from Europe to "pour in torrents" into Moundsville, as well as "induce the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to select this spot" for new rail service.
The article was signed "H.E.D. & Co."
"The author of this piece must have played a role in convincing the Tomlinsons to change their mind about opening the mound," said Oestreicher, who noticed similarities between the article's style and the wording and phrasing found in other writings by Clemens.
In his research, Oestreicher came across excerpts from a speech Clemens gave to students at Franklin College, and eventually located a copy of the entire speech in the Wheeling Public Library. Comparing it to the doctor's other known writings, and then to the article by "H.E.D. & Co.," many similarities became evident.
"They had the same flowery language, the same words and phrases, the same allusions, metaphors and alliteration, the same use of quotes from Shakespeare," said Oestreicher. "It became clear that James W. Clemens was the author of the H.E.D. article."
The Grave Creek Stone itself has been missing for more than a century. Thirty years after its discovery, it was in the collection of Squier's partner in an archeological firm just before the collection was sold to the Blackmore Museum, now part of the British Museum. Oestreicher said it might be languishing in a storage area somewhere in the British Museum, but no one knows for sure.
But before the relic turned up missing, the Smithsonian Institution obtained a photograph and wax cast of the stone, which was also sketched a number of times with varying degrees of accuracy.
Since the characters etched on the stone resemble writing found on antiquities from ancient Europe and the Middle East, Oestreicher researched all the Old World ancient language texts he could find that were available in 1838 America in an effort to determine a possible source for the inscriptions.
After poring through a few dozen tomes, Oestreicher came across a 1752 work by Spanish historian Don Luis Jose Velazques entitled "An Essay on the Alphabets of the Unknown Letters That Are Found in the Most Ancient Coins and Monuments of Spain." The book was a treatise on the origins of the alphabet and language of the Phoenicians and Celtiberians - a group of Celtic people who lived on the Iberian Peninsula before and during the era of the Roman Empire. It contained 20 pages of drawings of alphabetical characters and sketches of inscribed coins.
"Everything on the stone can be accounted for in Velazques' book," said Oestreicher. "Even some of his errors show up on the stone.... Identical clusters of letters from the book show up on the Grave Creek Stone, sometimes in the same order....The same impossible sequences of characters with the same mistakes are repeated on the stone."
Velazques' book "was not all that rare at the time," Oestreicher said. "Clemens either owned or borrowed a copy."
Oestreicher said it was known that Clemens had a machine shop at his home at 42 Union Street where he could have engraved the stone.
But Clemens did not begin his involvement with the opening of the Grave Creek Mound with the intention of initiating a hoax, according to the anthropologist. He bought into local legends about the mound containing thousands of burials with a fortune in funerary treasures, perhaps left by a civilization from the Old World that somehow arrived in America long before Columbus or Norse explorers.
But when the mound was opened in 1838, and an inner chamber located and explored, the results were a vast disappointment for Clemens and his fellow seekers of fortune and fame.
While archeologists would have been happy to study the pair of skeletons, beads made of seashells and copper bracelets found in the vault, the mound's excavation left Clemens and the Tomlinsons with little hope of getting rich from the venture.
But not long after the first chamber in the mound was determined to have been a financial bust, workers discovered the presence of a second chamber.
Clemens, neck deep in debt from bankrolling the excavation with borrowed money, "had a second chance," Oestreicher said.
According to a letter written by James Wharton, a reporter for the Wheeling Times in 1838, Clemens arranged for the Tomlinsons to notify him when it was time to open the second chamber, recently discovered by a tunneling crew. Clemens arranged for Wharton to accompany him to the mound on the day the lower chamber was entered.
"He seemed to anticipate a great discovery," Oestreicher said. Not long after Clemens and one of the Tomlinsons went into the mound, the stone was found at the end of the tunnel.
"The workmen thought it was nothing more than an Indian pictograph, and nobody but Clemens looked at the stone with any interest," said Oestreicher.
But later that year, Clemens' former medical partner wrote an article that appeared in the Cincinnati Chronicle about the mound's opening, including the discovery of the mysterious stone carved with "hieroglyphs," a sketch of which accompanied the piece.
The stone was later "translated" into a variety of texts, and its characters ascribed to alphabets ranging from Phoenician and Egyptian to Celtic and Norse.
The opening of the mound failed to generate any wealth for those involved in the venture. A small museum the Tomlinson group built at the mound went belly up within two years, and Clemens was forced to move his practice from his office to his home, and later sell his home in an attempt to pay off his debts.
"In a moment of weakness, he decided to risk sacrificing his reputation and his fortune," said Oestreicher.
Oestreicher's research on the Grave Creek Stone has "solved one of West Virginia's major archeological puzzles," said Robert Maslowski, a former Army Corps of Engineers archeologist who now teaches at Marshall and Concord universities.
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