Ocmulgee National Monument

By Matthew Jennings

People have called the land near the Ocmulgee River in present-day central Georgia home for a long time, perhaps as many as 17,000 years, and each successive group has left its mark on the landscape. Mississippian-era people erected the towering Great Temple Mound and other large earthworks around 1,000 years ago. In the late 17th century, Ocmulgee flourished as a center of trade between the Creek Indians and their English neighbors. In the 19th century, railroads did irreparable damage to the site in the name of progress and profit, slicing through it twice. Preservation efforts bore fruit in the 1930s, when Ocmulgee National Monument was created. Since then, people from all over the world have visited Ocmulgee. They come for many reasons, but they invariably leave with a reverence for the place and the people who built it hundreds of years ago and those who have maintained it in recent decades.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Jul 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781439652527

Matthew Jennings

Matthew Jennings, a history professor at Middle Georgia State College's Macon campus, has selected noteworthy images, mainly from the archival collection at Ocmulgee. Photographs, artifacts, documents, and oral history tell stories about Ocmulgee that can inspire as well as infuriate. Above all, though, Ocmulgee reminds people of the power of the past and their connection to it.

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INTRODUCTION

We do not know what the people who built Ocmulgee called it. The name, probably bestowed by a later Hitchiti-speaking group, has been translated variously as bubbling water, boiling water, and bubbling up of water from a spring. To the most recent inhabitants who live in the region, Maconites and other Middle Georgians, Ocmulgee National Monument is, and will likely remain, the Indian Mounds no matter the official National Park Service designation or future national park status.

The bubbling waters of the Ocmulgee River have been the lifeblood of the region since the arrival of the first inhabitants, between 15,000 and 17,000 years ago. Artifacts unearthed at the site stretch far into the past to periods archaeologists call Paleo-Indian, Archaic, and Woodland. The most spectacular displays, those most obvious to park visitors, date to the Mississippian period, roughly 1000 to 1500 CE. During this span, the townspeople at Ocmulgee constructed a central plaza and a sophisticated array of council houses and truncated pyramids, or platform mounds. What is now the main unit of the park was subsequently abandoned, perhaps in the 1200s. In the 1400s, a new ceremonial center grew a couple of miles downriver at what is now called the Lamar Site. Scholars believe that the Lamar Site was likely the Ichisi town mentioned in the chronicles of the Hernando de Soto expedition (1539–1543).

Spanish colonization starting in the 16th century and the English invasion of the 17th century reordered southeastern Native America. These outsiders posed a grave threat, but they presented opportunities as well. In the late 17th century, a number of Native peoples throughout the Southeast, including Muskogee-speakers from the Chattahoochee River country, moved to Ocmulgee. The English called the people there Ochese Creek Indians, after their name for the river, and at least part of the name stuck. The location was ideal for people who desired access to English trade goods but who did not necessarily care to have too many English neighbors. The dozen or more towns along the Ocmulgee and the English trading post there flourished until 1715, when the violence of the Yamasee War brought an end to this chapter of Ocmulgee’s history.

References to Ocmulgee from the early 1700s to the early 1800s are scattered, but significant. They indicate that many people passed through the former townsite on a path that stretched from the Creek heartland all the way to the coast. Ocmulgee served as a way station on the Creek Trading Path. A soldier riding with James Oglethorpe in the 1730s wrote that he camped at Ocmulgas River where there are three Mounts raised by the Indians over three of their Great Kings who were killed in the Wars. In the 1770s, naturalist William Bartram visited the site. In his Travels, published in 1791, he described visible monuments, or traces, of an ancient town, such as artificial mounts or terraces. Creeks visited the site less and less frequently over the years, but they maintained a spiritual connection to it. In the 19th century, as white Georgians dispossessed Native groups of most of their land, Creeks insisted that Ocmulgee was off-limits. The 1826 Treaty of Washington finally extinguished Creek claims to the sacred site—or so it may have seemed at the time.

Ocmulgee suffered irreparable damage under the stewardship of 19th- and early-20th-century Middle Georgians. In addition to the destruction caused by various economic activities on the site, two vicious railroad cuts, one in the 1840s and another in the 1870s, tore through the site, damaging sacred space and ripping through scores of graves. By the early 20th century, Ocmulgee was home to a number of different enterprises, including a roundhouse for the Central of Georgia Railroad, a dairy farm, and a brick factory. Maconites used the space as a pleasure ground as well, and young couples courted amid the ancient architecture.

The situation at Ocmulgee improved in the late 1920s, but the change was nearly imperceptible at first. Boy Scouts and treasure hunters began to pull things from the ground, including human remains and grave goods. Prominent Maconites began to request federal aid in preserving the site; eventually, Ocmulgee National Monument was born. From the mid-1930s until their efforts were interrupted by the advent of World War II, hundreds of workers under the auspices of various governmental agencies labored under the direction of a handful of professional archaeologists in the largest series of digs ever undertaken in the Southeast.

The 1950s marked a watershed moment in the history of Ocmulgee National Monument, both in terms of tourism and Native American involvement in the site. The visitor center opened to the public in 1951, and that year and again in 1952 large numbers of Creek citizens from Oklahoma visited, re-forging a connection with their ancestral lands in Georgia. Recent developments have bolstered the connection between Ocmulgee in Georgia and the current Muscogee (Creek) Nation capitol in Okmulgee, Oklahoma. More than one million people from all over the world have visited Ocmulgee National Monument since its inception in 1936. It is by far the most popular tourist attraction in