9 Foot Giant Skeleton is Removed from an Athens County, Ohio Burial Mound
A small remnant of the burial mound can still be seen to the left of the barn in this old photo. Messenger-Athens, Ohio, July 5, 1970. Let's hope the men who are building highways around Athens aren't superstitious because they just might upset the resting place of a long dead, super-size Indian. This fellow rests under Harmony Road where he curves eastward near the United Dairy. That's in the area where the Appalachian Highway will join Route 33 and the Stimson Avenue extension will cross the Hocking River over the structure that will replace the old East Mill Bridge. Now we really don't know if the guys with bulldozers and drag lines and earthmovers are going to dig up that part of Harmony Road, but if they do, then let them be warned. Resting under that curve is believed to be an Indian whose companions were eight feet long, and he might be larger. Back in 1905 a county highway crew was working on Harmony Road when a large mound stood in their way, so they began excavating the obstacle and soon uncovered a burial place containing 32 skeletons. Thurman Knox was the foreman and he related the story years later to the late C. H. Harris of The Messenger, telling him the skeletons were more than eight feet tall. He also told of the workers finding arrowheads and huge clay bowls used for cooking. Over the entire mound was a foot thick layer of plastic clay in which gravel was mixed. This formed a protective covering over the entire mound, making it impervious to rainfall. Supporting this roof were clay columns of the diameter of a barrel and set on top of each other. Knox told Harris that when the bones of 32 men were uncovered, all but one disintegrated to dust when exposed to air. One skeleton, of a man between eight and nine feet tall was recovered almost intact. The bones of the forearm, partially eaten away, were still several inches longer than those of a large man. The jawbone, filled with perfect teeth, was so large it fitted over the jaw of a large man like a mask. The excavation at East Mill went down 15 feet and in the center of a skeleton group was found a hard clay boxlike structure about six feet wide and 12 feet long. It was never opened and now lies under the center of the road near the diary. Knox ordered his men not to disturb the burial container and the workers felt that it probably held the bones of the chiefs.
Minnesota is a hotbed for the discovery of giant human skeletons that were a western extension of the Maritime Archaic that inhabited the Atlantic coastal regions to the Great Lakes. Star and Sentinel, August, 1, 1915 Battle Lake, Minn.-While hauling gravel from the Thore Glende farm northwest of here workmen discovered a huge human skeleton. The jaw bones were in good state of preservation and were of mammoth size. The teeth were intact and about twice the size of the average man's. Some of the teeth looked as though they had been filled with cement, but in all probability were sound at the time of death and the enamel had decayed, leaving the darker colored interior exposed. The jaw was taken to St. Louis by L. D. Johnson, who was present when the skeleton was discovered and possibly experts there can throw some light upon the discovery. Those who saw the remains estimated that when living the man must have been fully eight feet in height.
Poster from the ground breaking documentary, The Mystery of the Lost Red Paint People. The Discovery of a Prehistoric North American Sea Culture. Stone mounds with doorway lintels and Megalithic standing stones found in North America Advanced seafaring culture lived in New England 7000 years ago. http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/paint.html Lewiston Evening Journal, July 25, 1907 It is likely that the visitors of the Tercentennial, either at Bath or at Popham, may have the privilege of seeing skeletons of two of the magnificent specimens of physical manhood such as the American Indian of the days Sebenio,Samoset,Nahanada and Sansoa really were. Which, being interpreted, is that when James Perkins dug the cellar of his house at Popham Beach, on the knoll next north of the Riverside Hotel, the skeletons unearthed, whowere, in life from six to seven feet inheight, giants in fact. Mr. Perkins took the jaw boneof one of these Indians and placed it on his own face. It completely encased his jaw and he is a pretty good sized man. Mr. Perkins gathered all the bones of these two skeletons together and placed them in a barrel and reinterred them so. It is proposed to dig up the barrel and have the bones set together to illustrate what manner of inhabitants Weymouth and Popham discovered in the earliest years of the 17th century when they arrived in this sectionof Maine.
