Have you ever found anything surprising–or shocking–while digging in Lawrence County soil?

Throughout our county’s history, people have accidentally disinterred or discovered human remains in surprising places. Here are three tales of local folks who, without meaning to, disturbed the final resting place of the deceased.

According to a very old oral tradition, the community of Henryville is said to have been built on the site of an ancient Indian village. Although this story has never been proven, local people have, indeed, found thousands of Indian relics concentrated in the vicinity throughout the years.

One old-timer recorded another dim memory in the Annals of the Lawrence County Historical Society in the early 1950s. According to a story told at one of the society’s first meetings, a grisly discovery was once made on a hill north of town, at the site of the old stand (a sort of antebellum inn where travelers could rest) which stood just outside of Henryville.

We don’t know how or when, but, as the story goes, someone once accidentally discovered a mass grave of several human skeletons buried in the yard of that stand. Due to the scant details recorded in the Annals, we can only speculate as to who these people were and why they were buried in the yard of the old stand.

If the discovery was made after the Civil War, then it seems that the most obvious answer is that these bodies belonged to men killed in the skirmish fought by Forrest’s cavalry along the Central Turnpike in November 1864.

But it could also be possible that those skeletons could have belonged to Indians who died many generations before whites settled the area, or that the bones disturbed were those of some of the area’s earliest settlers. Perhaps it was the result of some forgotten pestilence? Or perhaps it was foul play? All we can do is speculate.

There is no speculation, however, as to what a local man found near Ethridge one autumn day almost a century ago.

On November 16, 1916, a young man was looking over some land he had recently purchased about two miles east of Ethridge, “116 steps south of the Ethridge and Weakley Creek mail road,” when he came upon the scattered and bleached bones and tattered clothing of a recently-murdered man.

The coroner determined that the bones–which had been gnawed upon and scattered by hogs and dogs and other such scavengers–belonged to a white male, about 35 years of age who had been dead for about three or four months. His hat, which lay nearby, was full of thin slits, which corresponded to marks on the skull, leading authorities to the conclusion that he had probably been stabbed to death.

The clothing was identified as that of a young man named Marion Clifton, who had left Giles County about four months before bound for Texas, but whose family had not heard from him since. It is an eerie thought, indeed, that for months, these bones lay just feet away from people passing by on the busy road nearby.

Our final tale tonight comes again from the vicinity of Mt. Zion and Appleton, from the battlefield of Sugar Creek. On the day after Christmas, 1864, when a thick fog shrouded the valley, General Nathan Bedford Forrest dealt a stinging blow to pursuing Federal forces there. The Battle of Sugar Creek left more than 150 men and horses dead on the field, in the woods, and no doubt in the creek, itself.

Locals still discover bullets, buttons, buckles and other Civil War paraphernalia from the area. But perhaps the most gruesome discovery happened completely by accident, some eight decades after the smoke had cleared.

While plowing corn in one of his fields near Sugar Creek in the 1940s, local farmer Steve Ball–who, in a twist of fate, was the grandson of a Union cavalryman who had fought at Sugar Creek–accidentally dug up the remains of one of the soldiers who fell at the battle. There was nothing present with the remains to indicate to Mr. Ball if the skeleton was Union or Confederate. The body was later given a proper burial at the nearby Puncheon cemetery.

Have you ever dug up anything strange in Lawrence County?