Almost 100 years ago the City of Springfield built a box culvert to channel Jordan Creek through downtown. For decades the city has been making plans to undo that work, mostly due to issues with flooding. But before they can finally break ground on what is known as the Renew Jordan Creek project this Fall, they need to know what’s buried underneath the creek’s former banks.
Jen Rideout is a field director with the Bernice S. Warren Center for Archaeological Research at Missouri State University. The Center conducted an archaeological survey of the Jordan Creek construction site. When I met up with her, the team was digging pits on a strip of parking lots and greenspace across from Brick City just off the square in Springfield. Many of these lots have been here as long as the culvert.
Rideout explained, “it’s just been kind of sealed. Which is really great for archaeologists, because, especially in urban environments, we don’t really have a sealed time capsule all that often.”
The layers of time were easy to see. Rideout pointed to red clay fill and the dark stripe of a big fire. They’d dug through layers of dumping grounds, filled with bottles and broken porcelain. They found parts of the Springfield Wagon Company, which once powered itself with Jordan Creek and a later lumber yard. They dug further into what Rideout called “pre-contact” layers. It was a deep climb down almost a story to where the bank of the creek used to be. On the day I visited, they still had a few pits to dig, and they’d just found a series of wooden framed pits they suspected were for tanning hides.
After the dig, I caught up with Rideout and Kevin Cupka Head, director of the center. They told me they did find a few surprises. Those wooden frames they found were for tanning, and they were from the 1830s or 40s, as old as the city itself. They were likely built by an early settler named Eli Jessup who was in the tanning industry with William Parker Cox. They were in good shape for 180 years old.
Cupka Head said, “they were still full of the oak bark that would have been used for tanning,” and Rideout said the wooden boards “could have been put in the ground a few years ago.” (See footnote for additional information about Jessup and Cox provided by Rideout)
In another area they found unbroken precontact sites from Native American tribes, including what Rideout described as “two hearths” that were still intact, essentially “abandoned and buried campfires from the pre-contact period.”
They told me they found remnants of tool making and complete artifacts like spearpoints and knife blades.
They said they're working to learn more about these sites, including testing for composition and better dating. They hope more precontact sites may be uncovered during construction, shedding light on Native American life along Jordan Creek.
The top layers were pretty straight forward, but these lower layers may require more attention when construction begins on the next chapter of Jordan Creek.
As Cupka Head explained, “going forward in construction, there’s going to be an archaeologist monitoring on site when they get close to those layers. They’re going to have to slow down, our archaeologists are going to have to come in and monitor and deal with anything that may be exposed.”
The monitoring they’ll do during construction and the report they’re working on now is all required because this project involves a waterway. Nationwide, any construction that involves a waterway, requires a federal permit or is paid for with federal money can trigger what those in the industry call a “Section 106”. It is part of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966.
“It could be a city that’s doing it, it could be an engineering company that’s being contracted by a city or a private entity,” said Cupka head. "In any project like this, “they’re going to need to find a consultant qualified to do that work, and that’s where we come in. There’s a whole industry of mostly private firms but also university-based research centers all over the country.”
As Rideout put it when describing the importance of the law, even if the land is privately owned for the moment, the history that could be destroyed belongs to everyone.
“People in the past, people in the present, people in the future,” she explained, adding that this project is a good example that we can still do this research without stopping construction.
Their main task is to make sure projects run smoothly and are prepared for anything they may find in the ground. She said, among other things, she feels preserving this cultural data and creating opportunities to respectfully handle potential human remains is the least the nation can do for Native American tribes who were forcibly displaced and have for hundreds of years had countless heritage sites desecrated for the sake of progress in the US. The Warren Center has worked in communication with the Osage Nation and other tribes on this and many area projects.
The trenches dug for the archaeological survey of the Renew Jordan Creek project are now filled back in. Last we spoke, Rideout and Cupka Head were still completing their report. They hope to share their findings with the public in the months ahead. If you’re curious, Cupka Head said that’ll likely happen at a meeting of the Ozarks Chapter of the Missouri Archaeological Society.
Footnote on Eli Jessup.
From Jen Rideout:
“Research is ongoing, but so far, we know that Eli Jessup and his wife Sarah/Sally Lattimore were born in North Carolina in the 1810s. They married and had their first child in Indiana and moved to Springfield ca. 1836 where they had 5 more children. Eli set up the tannery in Jordan Valley between the Julian carding machine and the Boonville Bridge and, sometime after 1839, partnered with William P. Cox.
Eli died young in 1848 (from unknown causes), and Cox (serving as his executor) had to sell off the Jessup real estate in 1850, likely marking the end of the tannery in the valley.
Their son Thomas married Frances Mack (daughter of “Alphabet” Mack) and remained local and may also have been a partner at the tannery. Sarah never remarried and moved to Texas with 3 of her children: Smith (with wife Joanna Fulbright Kenny), William (unmarried), and Harriet (married to Charles Barnett). Their daughter Mary Jane married Willis Chandler and moved to Lebanon. There may also have been another son named John, but we don’t know what happened to him after 1850.”