Digging into the past

CEDAR RAPIDS - Osgood Shepherd, to whom history accords the likely status of Cedar Rapids' first permanent settler, built his cabin in the 1830s along the east side of the Cedar River near, where the Tree of Five Seasons now stands at First Avenue and First Street NE.

This is the spot where a team of archeologists, under contract with the Army Corps of Engineers, this week began to dig in hopes of finding some remnant of Shepherd's time - on the way to a deeper dig to find even older artifacts from the era when American Indians spent time here along the river.

Over the next six weeks, David Benn, research coordinator and principal investigator for Bear Creek Archeology in Cresco, will lead a team of the company's archeologists, who will dig at five sites along the east side of the river in and below the downtown. The sites were picked after an initial investigation a year ago, which included borings into the ground and down through history. Two of the five sites turned up prehistoric artifacts then.

The work is required by federal law as a way to identify and investigate possible significant historic and prehistoric sites in and along the alignment of the proposed flood-protection system. The work will lead to a report about the city's prehistory and its early working-class neighborhoods, with likely exhibits of artifacts unearthed during the work.

On Tuesday, Benn reported that his team had come across a spear point, perhaps 3,000 years old, made of whitish chert. The spear point, though, happened to be in a top layer of dirt and sand, not at a prehistoric depth at the site, which is where the crew is headed.

To get to the prehistoric doesn't mean digging to China at these two spots along First Street NE, but rather to about a depth of five or six feet, said Benn, 63, who has a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

By Tuesday afternoon, the team was going slowly, using standard shovels, to dig gravelike rectangles in the ground. At a depth of three feet, they still had yet to get through more modern-day fill to the ground level upon which Shepherd stood in the 1830s.

The Army Corps of Engineers is paying Bear Creek $290,000 for the current phase of work.

Benn said subsurface borings made a year ago in neighborhood sites near the river turned up animal bones to indicate that early Cedar Rapids workers ate cow, pig, chicken, squirrel and raccoon, said Benn.

“At the end of the day, we're going to know quite a bit more about the prehistoric Cedar Rapids,” he said. “Not everything, but quite a lot. And we're going to know about the working-class folks of Cedar Rapids. People who were here 150 years ago. People who did the work, who built the city.”