Wisconsin groups seek to preserve Indigenous mounds, including recent rediscovery

Forest Home Cemetery and Arboretum in Milwaukee recently announced that two Indigenous burial mounds were rediscovered on the property.

Wisconsin is home to thousands of ancient burial and effigy mounds created by Indigenous peoples of the region as early as 800 B.C. Archaeologists and historians have long known about two conical mounds likely residing on the property of Forest Home Cemetery, which was designed in the mid-1800s by Increase Lapham, a notable Wisconsin naturalist and civil engineer. 

But only recently, experts confirmed the mounds’ precise location. 

Sara Tomilin is executive director of the Forest Home Historic Preservation Association, a nonprofit that supports the cemetery’s historical and educational programming. She told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that she launched a new effort to identify the mounds after Sally Merrell, a volunteer tour guide, asked about where they were located so she could be accurate when giving tours of the cemetery.

Tomilin invited Bill Quackenbush, tribal historic preservation officer for the Ho-Chunk Nation, to visit the cemetery and verify any mounds on the property. Quackenbush is an expert in mound identification and preservation and is often consulted on mound-related projects throughout the state.

“(Quackenbush) came out in February 2023, and he basically said, ‘Here’s a mound, and here’s a mound.’ It was very quick that he was able to interpret that,” Tomilin said.

The cemetery is currently working with historians, tribal experts and family members of buried individuals to develop a plan to preserve and care for the mounds and put up signage to share their history with visitors. While nothing has been decided yet, Tomilin believes the cemetery is in a good position to care for the mounds now and into the future.

“We are a national historic site. We are tasked with remembering people and also making sure that burial areas are protected. So I feel like this is completely in our wheelhouse, and it’s a very good place to have these mounds,” she said. 

Caring for Indigenous mounds around the state

Burial mounds like the ones at Forest Home are protected by Wisconsin statute, specifically from a 1985 law that established standards for protecting burial sites and created the Wisconsin Burial Sites Preservation Board. But some mounds don’t include human remains, and these sites require additional measures for preservation and care.

That’s where the Effigy Mounds Initiative comes in. It’s a volunteer group founded and run by Kurt Sampson, who also works as director and curator for the Dodge County Historical Society Museum and volunteers as an interpretive ranger at the Effigy Mounds National Monument. 

“We go around the state and we work with private and public landowners that have mound sites on their property,” Sampson said. 

Sampson’s group offers to help catalog the mounds and register them with the Wisconsin Historical Society, which then puts them under the protection of state law.

“What a lot of landowners don’t realize is that if you have a mound site on your property and you have an archeologist like myself come and get that site cataloged, you can get a tax reduction on that portion of your property taxes,” Sampson said. “So, there is incentive for landowners to help preserve the remaining mounds that are in the state.” 

The other major undertaking of the Effigy Mounds Initiative is to visit mound sites and identify the best practices to care for them. Often, this involves putting together volunteer crews to remove invasive vegetation like buckthorn and garlic mustard that can damage mounds. Sometimes, crews need to remove trees because as trees mature, they can fall over and completely uproot the mound.

“I’ve been on many, many mound sites around the state where actual ancient burials have been exposed from trees tipping over,” Sampson said. “The way the burial sites protection act is written in Wisconsin is that you can’t have any subsurface disturbance of the mound site proper. So, what we do is we cut those stumps flush to the ground or flush to the mound surface, and then treat them and then continue to monitor that on a seasonal basis.”

Sampson and the Effigy Mounds Initiative recently received an award from the Wisconsin Historical Society for their five-year project restoring Nitschke Mounds County Park in Dodge County. 

The group’s latest undertaking is in Chetek, where volunteers have started caring for a set of mounds that have become overgrown known as the Pleasant Plain Mound Group.

“That site had a lot of mounds that were also pitted into by relic hunters in the distant past, so those mounds were compromised from an erosional standpoint,” Sampson said. “So, we’re working to eventually try to shore up those issues, as well.”

Caring for the mound sites in this way can be time-intensive and require a lot of resources. But Sampson believes the investment is worth it to protect the state’s remaining mounds. There are about 4,000 mounds left in the state out of an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 total mounds before colonization. 

“These mounds are all part of our unique cultural heritage as a people in Wisconsin,” he said. “Archeological resources are a nonrenewable resource, and once they’re destroyed, they’re gone forever. So, I think it’s part of our collective cultural heritage that all of us care for these sites.”