This little story started with a bang on a beautiful fall Saturday back in the mid-1950s. It indeed involved an explosion, but it was still a disappointing bang.
But 10-15 minutes after a dark blue, plastic model airplane (with a built-in cherry bomb) took an unfortunate nose-dive into the Cobb County side of the Chattahoochee River, its demise would become evidence supporting the Law of Unintended Consequences. It proved to be a trigger for a lifetime assumption in the possibilities for discovery, for awareness, and for curiosity.
One day soon – Saturday, August 7, 12-4 p.m., to be exact – I will be at the Plaza attending the Old School History Museum’s “Archaeology Day.” One of the family activities invites people, young or old, to bring in arrowheads and pottery shards they have found over the years. Members of the Ocmulgee Archaeological Society will be on hand to add some meaning and context to the artifacts – how old they might be, how they were made, why they were made, how they were used, etc.
I will be the guy – gray hair, somewhat taller, and decidedly heavier than the scrawny boy of six-plus decades ago – who will be holding three small, beat-up paper sacks. I have a question for the pros.
One of those three sacks – and I don’t know which one; I didn’t know enough at the time to label them – originated on that beautiful fall Saturday back in the mid-1950s.
On that fall Saturday, four neighborhood boys walked two miles down a dirt road. They walked with anticipation and considerable animation. I was one of the four. The boy who built the model airplane gripped it tightly and carried it the whole way. It was his idea and his baby. And he had remembered to sneak 4-5 wooden matches out of the house.
The dirt road dead-ended into a paved collector road headed toward the river some 200 yards away. The crossing of the river involved a one-lane trestle bridge with heavy plank flooring, similar to the abandoned bridge over Murder Creek on Glenwood Springs Road. We inched our way cautiously out onto the bridge.
From there, the morning adventure went quickly. Very quickly. Without saying anything, the guy with the plane whipped out a kitchen match, lit the fuse, and heaved the plane out over the river. I guess we had envisioned the plane soaring high out over the river for the cherry bomb to do its work. It didn’t.
The plane had a heavy nose and no motor. The boy’s heave took the plane out about 12-15 feet, and then gravity took over. The plane went straight down. At about the water level or just under it, the cherry bomb went off. We bent over the railing and stared: a couple of small ripples, a couple of bits of blue plastic floating downstream. The morning adventure was over – all in two seconds, maybe three. Finally, one boy asked, “Whatchy’all want to do now?”
There seemed to be nothing to do now but trudge two miles back home on that dirt road. But we hadn’t trudged 100 yards when things changed. Alongside the 200-yard stretch before our turnoff lay a freshly-cut cornfield. And the farmer had left the gate open. Without a word about why we were doing it, we poured through the gate. Following the truck tracks across the stubbled rows, one boy bent down and began studying something that looked no bigger than his thumbnail.
What’s this?” he said, and we gathered around. Made of some kind of clay and with a slight curvature, it was smooth on one side but imprinted with a design on the other.
“I bet that’s Indian pottery,” said one, and we all scattered to see if we could find any.
That fall we returned two or three more times to that cornfield. We developed an attachment, a connection. We had discovered it. Slowly, vaguely, probably subconsciously, we became aware that other people – different from us, yet also quite like us – had built a settlement on this fertile spot hundreds of years before us, maybe 1,000 years before. We became curious to know more – what were these people like, why would they spend their time making and decorating clay pots.
Over the next few years, there would be trips to the Etowah River valley, 50 miles to the northwest, and to the Oconee River valley, 80 miles to the southeast, hence the second and third of the three small sacks. But the questions remain.
Contributed by: Rufus Adair
Board Member and Docent of Old School History Museum
Retired Newspaper Reporter and Teacher
Be sure to visit the Old School History Museum to view our own collection of Native American artifacts. Our permanent collection features an interesting variety of pottery shards, and even a few intact pieces of pottery as well as many arrowheads.
Our downtown windows are also decorated with Native American apparel, instruments, and spiritual items to coincide with the Archaeology Day event. For more information about our upcoming event > click here.
