Exhibits

prehistory & pioneers

MADDIE - Our Mastodon

Maddie's nearly complete skeleton was discovered south of Chesterfield, Indiana in 1993.  The bones and outline are now greeting visitors as our favorite mascot.

From the Ice Age, Madison County has 12,000 years of natural history.  This exhibit shows the bones and bone castings of the Ice Age mega-fauna (huge animals) that lived here 12,000 years ago. Mastodons, beavers the size of small cars, camels, tree sloths, and giant buffalos left their skeletal remains here along the White River watershed.

Madison County, Indiana has 3,000 years of human history.  The Adena Culture of hunter-gatherers was established in the region between 800 B.C. and 1000 B.C.  They buried their dead in prominent mounds with timber-lined tombs.  These ancient people would eventually developed into the Hopewell Culture.  The Hopewell mound builders existed between 200 B.C. and 500 A.D., and they are the ones who constructed the earthworks we see today in Mounds State Park.  Probably used as a type of calendar, the mounds are aligned to the seasonal positions of the sun and moon.  The large earthwork may also have been used for ceremonial proposes.  The acreage that contains the mounds was saved from destructive housing developments by the Madison County Historical Society in 1929.

The county has 200 years of recent history.  Beginning around 1818, Americans from the east and south were moving into central Indiana. Their tools, weapons, house wares, and clothing are on display, and the names of these first Madison County families are listed in the history of the township which they helped settle.  For each of the fourteen townships, early pictures are shown and modern road maps chart where the townships’ pioneer cemeteries are located.

Those local families...

who still own the land their ancestors claimed are represented on our wall of “Hoosier Homesteads.”

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