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Curator digs through classic work of Clark County archaeology

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By Tom Stafford, Staff Writer 10:26 PM Sunday, June 14, 2009

Bob Morris isn’t looking for signs of iron oxide or yellow ochre.

He’s not expecting to unearth ceremonial tools or trinkets, breast plates or spear points.

Instead of searching for a body of the sort once found in Adena and Hopewell burial sites in Clark County, the curator of the Clark County Historical Society’s archaeological collection is trying to flesh a body of work — the substantial body of work left behind by amateur archaeologist Arthur R. Altick.

When Morris started digging through the historical society’s archaeological collection in 2003, “I was kind of amazed at how much stuff they had related to what he’d done,” Morris said.

The retired Wittenberg University geology professor has since spent most of his Tuesday and Thursday mornings poring over three boxes of Altick’s written work — plus boxes and boxes of artifacts.

Morris also has published articles about the Manring and Boblett mounds based an Altick’s work.

But it wasn’t until this spring at a meeting with Altick’s son that Morris discovered just how much he has in common with the man who did so much to preserve the area’s Adena and Hopewell history.

A brief sketch

Born June 22, 1891, in Dayton, Arthur Riggs Atlick was raised and educated in Springfield, attended Wittenberg College and earned a degree from Willis Business College. He was working at the Kelly Springfield Motor Truck Co. when he was called into the army in World War I to work in the Motor Vehicles Division of the Quartermaster’s Corps in Washington, D.C.

While stationed there, Altick demonstrated his interest in history and skill in writing and photography by sending home reports about his visits to Washington area historic sites and Civil War battlefields.

The accounts were published regularly in the Springfield Daily News.

Altick later was transferred to carry on similar work in Cleveland, where he is presumed to have met Cleveland native Ethel Rose, whom he married on April 21, 1921, and brought to Springfield.

Back home, Altick served as secretary of the Springfield Chamber of Commerce from 1919-22, then was involved with various other local business interests.

Among them were the local Real Estate Board and Good Roads Council. After being assistant manager of the Magnetic Springs Hotel and manager of the Office Outfitters until 1933, he got the job that allowed him to work full time on his hobby. He became secretary of the Clark County Historical Society.

Youthful interests

Altick’s interest in archaeology “actually started when he was a very young boy,” said Altick’s son, Art, who lives in the Forest Hill neighborhood off Shrine Road in Springfield.

The elder Altick’s stepfather, Richard Brown, took his stepson with him to a farmer friend’s place “and the farmer had little bowl of arrowheads he found in a field,” the younger Altick said.

From then on, Altick, a hunter, fisherman and outdoorsman, had what his son calls “a lifelong hobby.”

After the elder Altick’s father died, he spent some time in Cleveland with his grandmother. There he discovered another interest that would aid his work in archaeology.

“He did paintings of ships up there that are beautiful,” his son said.

A meticulous man

“Because he didn’t have an archaeological degree from any university, he had a hard time getting his work published” in professional journals, said Morris.

As a result, much of his work appeared in the Springfield newspapers, in the local Escalade magazine and in Chicago-based Hobbies magazine, Morris said.

Despite a lack of formal training — or maybe, in part, because of it — Altick was “very careful” both in excavating sites and recording what he saw, Morris said.

“He did a meticulous job of taking measurements. And things that were encountered — artifacts of burials — he made very good notes on positions of the skeleton” and other details, Morris said.

Morris called Altick’s drawings “outstanding.” They are so precise, he told Altick’s son, “I’ve been able to use this drawing your dad did to go into the collection and find some of these pieces” whose identifying labels had been lost over the years.

The Adena and Hopewell

Two so-called Woodland era cultures living in Ohio were the Adena and the Hopewell, Morris explained.

The Adena were the earlier group whose artifacts tend to be simpler. Hopewell artifacts, on the other hand, tend to be more sophisticated and include “exotic” materials.

“They’re the culture that had really fine craftsmen that traded from various directions,” he said. “They traded and got native copper from the Copper Culture” in northern Michigan; used conch shells from the Carolinas and Florida “for making all kinds of beads;” and obsidian from as far away as what is now Yellowstone National Park, Morris said.

Altick had a hand in writing about what Morris said may have been one of the biggest Hopewell mounds in all of Western Ohio and among the largest in the Midwest. Called the Manring Mound, after a modern owner of the property, it was in Harmony Twp. near New Love Road and was first substantially disturbed in the 1830s, when crews extended the National Road toward Springfield.

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