Indian Old Fields is a 3,500-acre plain located about 12 miles southeast of Winchester. The area lies between Lulbegrud Creek and Upper Howard's Creek. It is crossed from west to east by the Mountain Parkway and Ironworks Road and from north to south by Kiddville Road and Trapp-Goff's Corner Road. As the name implies, Indian Old Fields has long been known as an area of Native American occupation. Archaeologists have identified sites there dating as far back as the Archaic Period, between 8000-1000 B.C. A later people - today referred to as the Adena Culture - left their mark on the landscape in the form of mounds and earthworks called "sacred circles." Their culture is the focus of a new book entitled "Adena," by Gwynn Henderson and Eric Schlarb at the Kentucky Archaeology Survey. The introduction refers to the Adena as "mobile hunting-gathering-gardening peoples who lived in the middle Ohio River valley between 2,500 and 1,800 years ago. Over this long period, they built thousands of burial mounds and scores of geometric earthworks. Their mounds were the focus of their social, economic, and religious lives, and the physical expression of their beliefs about the world and their place in it." Clark County Public Library and the Bluegrass Heritage Museum have copies of this informative book.
Where is Indian Old Fields?
Signs of more recent habitation at Indian Old Fields were observed when early settlers arrived in search of land. In the summer of 1775, a party of men came out from Virginia, explored the country north of the Kentucky River and marked off claims for 5,800 acres of land between Upper Howard's Creek and Lulbegrud. The group included Marquis Calmes Jr. and Sr., Cuthbert Combs, Benjamin Combs and Benjamin Berry. Marquis Jr. subsequently petitioned Virginia for rights to "a settlement [400 acres] & preemption [1,000 acres] lying on an Old Indian Town on Lulbers, Grud Creek by Settling & raising a Crop of Corn in the year 1775."
A lawsuit over Cuthbert Combs' land claims produced sworn statements from the pioneers regarding what they saw when they first arrived in the area. Marquis Jr. testified in 1813 that the men named above formed a company "for the purpose of taking up lands; and that this deponant with the before mentioned persons employed Major Beasly and William Beasly to improve for them for the term of twelve months; and that the said company with the said Beaslys encamped at the place now called the block house."
The blockhouse was a military outpost built for the use of militia in defense against the Indians. The blockhouse, located on Old Field Branch, a tributary of Lulbegrud, was erected very near the site "where we the said company built a Cabbin and planted corn with the assistance of the aforesaid hired men and left the aforesaid hired men [the Beasleys] to cultivate the corn and take care of the same." Calmes was asked where the Indian towns were located. He answered, "I considered the main Indian Town and their last improvements to be at the gate posts and the Indian improvements extended across my preemption."
The "gate posts" were two wooden posts found on Calmes' land that looked old at the time the company first explored the area. When asked if there was an Indian town at the blockhouse and pigeon roost, Calmes replied that "there was a small Town at each place." [The pigeon roost was the subject of a "Where in the World" column in the Winchester Sun, December 28, 2006.]
To be continued in next Thursday's edition of the Sun.
