Action News 5 digs up history and treasures of Native Americans in Cross Co.
PARKIN, Ark. (WMC) - We’re road tripping, Five-Star Story-style, to check out a state park-turned-landmark with centuries of stories to be told!
Action News 5 went to Cross County, Arkansas, to dig up history with a new designation.
Some places are layered in history, like Parkin Archeological State Park along the St. Francis River. The history lessons come from above as well as below ground.
Parkin Archeological State Park
As Park Superintendent Nathan Odom told Action News 5, “We had a tree fall down and roughly 12,000 artifacts came out of that rootball.”
Odom and Action News 5’s Kym Clark trekked along a three-quarter-mile paved walking trail for a trip back in time, while weaving around a 17-acre field with a mound that once housed a bustling American Indian village from A.D. 1000 to about 1550.
“The Chieftain’s mound that is still standing. It’s about a 23-foot-tall platform mound. They also see remnants of the moat that surrounded the village,” he said.
Park Superintendent Nathan Odom with Parkin Archeological State Park and Action News 5’s Kym Clark trek along a three-quarter-mile walking trail while weaving around a 17-acre field with a mound that once housed a bustling American Indian village from A.D. 1000 to about 1550.
Replica tools and artifacts, like spears with atlatls, or spear throwers, as well as a prehistoric drill among others, help park visitors imagine what life might have been like in that village.
The village site is also where, in 1541, Chief Casqui likely met Hernando DeSoto, the first European to cross the Mississippi River and the namesake of our big “M” bridge across that same river.
Park Superintendent Nathan Odom with Parkin Archeological State Park
Artifacts like a metal bell, glass bead and lead shot, all used by the Spaniards of that time and found onsite, are now displayed in the Visitor Center.
“It’s almost reported as a peaceful interaction, at this point. Casqui met him with a group of people with gifts to meet with DeSoto as they were coming in, and he offered to have them stay in the village,” Odom explained.
Park visitors can also get a feel for what life was like for those Spanish explorers with replicas of their armor that you’re invited to pick up (if you can, since it’s very heavy) and try on.
Action News 5's Kym Clark holds replica of 1500s-era Spanish chainmail at Parkin Archeological State Park
Imagine wearing that heavy chainmail during a hot and humid Arkansas summer or handling their ancient weapons, replicas of which are also on hand, and you are welcome to handle.
DeSoto reportedly left the area two years later. The native population eventually disappeared, too, because of disease, lack of resources, and even slavery.
But the land wasn’t abandoned for long.
Park Superintendent Nathan Odom with Parkin Archeological State Park and Action News 5’s Kym Clark interact with replica of Quapaw Nation tool
“Sometime during the 1600s, the Quapaw Nation migrated into this area, and then in the late 1600s, the French explorers started coming into Arkansas and encountering the Quapaw and other of the modern tribes,” Odom relayed.
That aboriginal past is the reason why representatives with Arkansas State Parks and the Arkansas Archeological Survey designated the Parkin site as a state landmark this past March, giving enhanced protection to scientific studies on these ancient acres.
After the Quapaw were removed from the land, it sat abandoned for nearly 300 years before the Northern Ohio Cooperage and Lumber Company set up a sawmill on the southern end of the field in the 1900s.
Northern Ohio Cooperage and Lumber Company
“And they built a worker town, for all their employees, they built a town and that was directly on top of the site,” Odom told Action News 5.
And north of the village and mound site sits a one-room schoolhouse that was renovated to its original form in 2006.
“We have a one-room schoolhouse. That’s the Northern Ohio School because the sawmill’s the one that built the school and it has its own story. It was operated from 1910 to 1948, it was operated as the African American schoolhouse for this area,” he described.
Northern Ohio School at Parkin Archeological State Park
The lumber company shut down in 1946, and the area that once housed sawmill workers became a modern community known as “Sawdust Hill” or “The Hill.”
Then, in 1967, the area was designated a state park.
Today, the Visitor Center includes a research station where artifacts from onsite excavations are analyzed by Station Archeologist Dr. Robert Scott.
Parkin Archeological State Park Station Archeologist Dr. Robert Scott
“What we really like to find is the decorated stuff, and yeah, so like this is a really distinctive handle,” he said while showing a recovered piece of pottery," ...so this would have been like a jar, what we call ajar."
Dr. Scott also shared an opportunity for amateur archaeologists.
Quapaw Nation artifacts at Parkin Archeological State Park
“We started doing a public training program that is still going on. We do it for two weeks in June where people that wanna learn about archeology and help us to do archeology can take a series of seminars, just learning basic excavation and then lab analysis,” he said.
If digging to get artifacts isn’t your thing, you can also try piecing together history with two-dimensional puzzles set up in the center. Either way, you can see the full display of artifacts already pieced together from the earliest inhabitants to the last.
Quapaw Nation arrowheads at Parkin Archeological State Park
“It just shows that this history goes back generations and generations. And American History, Arkansas history, it really goes back thousands of years,” expressed Odom.
Parkin Archeological State Park has a lot of summer activities planned for kids and adults alike. To learn more about that and the park, click on this link.
