Native American mounds a casualty of Hopping Brook expansion (Holliston MA)

By Bill Shaner

Daily News staff

   "HOLLISTON – Along the edge of woods that crews have recently cut to expand the Hopping Brook Business Park sat a pile of stones unlike the uprooted boulders and tree trunks in which it surrounded.

   The stones were laid in an oval-shaped mound. The mound had rounded edges that wrapped around a depression in the center. Overgrown and worn, with faded moss on the granite rocks, the mound had clearly been there for years. Some would argue it's been there for centuries.

   A small but resolute group of archaeologists, historians and activists believe the mound is one of thousands of similar artifacts, sometimes called rock piles, that predate white settlers. Left by native people, experts believe they were created for spiritual purposes, perhaps for burial or other ceremonies.

    And soon, that one particular mound in Holliston will be gone.

 The mound on Tuesday afternoon resembled an island, surrounded by hundreds of acres of deforested land. Crews had already removed a mound next to it, said Joanne Hulbert, town historian.

“That's pretty much the sad tale of it,” said Hulbert. “Bulldoze it over, the march of progress, and a little vestige of Native American evidence goes away once more.”

When the 200-acre development, essentially a delayed second leg of the Hopping Brook Business Park, is complete, the mound will make way for a road or a parking lot, foundation for an office space or a warehouse. Construction started about a month ago.

Standing by the mound, Matthew Howes, a Holliston man who's helped archaeologists discover and register native landmarks in the area, lamented the fact it would disappear.

“People need to kind of wake up and realize that native people were here for thousands of years … and their remains are everywhere,” he said.

There are hundreds of similar mounds in the area, and those who are passionate about native histories want to see more thought given to their preservation.

Curtiss Hoffman, a Bridgewater State University professor, has inventoried about 5,100 similar mounds all along the Eastern Seaboard, from Georgia to Nova Scotia. The mounds, he said, often sit in clusters – 50 or so built very close to one another. It's something he feels isn't an accident.

The only way to truly save the mounds is to have state preservation offices acknowledge them as historic, and include them in state registries. Until then, he said, local ordinances and land acquisitions to preserve the mounds are the most effective method.

But before that happens, there needs to be consensus in the archaeological community. Some feel the mounds are the product of colonial farmers removing rocks from farmland. Hoffman feels the mounds are too deliberate, too ornate in their arrangement, for that to be legitimate." 

Bill Shaner can be reached at 508-626-3957 or at wshaner@wickedlocal.com. Follow him on Twitter @bill_shaner.

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