Grand Meadow Quarry Archeological District

Grand Meadow Quarry Archeological District
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
Nearest city	Grand Meadow, Minnesota
Area	170 acres (69 ha)
NRHP reference No.	94000345
Added to NRHP	April 8, 1994

The Grand Meadow Quarry Archeological District (21MW8) in Mower County, Minnesota, United States, is an Indigenous historic district that was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994. The principal site within the District is the Grand Meadow Chert Quarry (GMCQ), originally a sprawling landscape of an estimated 2,000 pits dug over many centuries using handheld tools to reach a layer of high-quality gray chert (or "flint"). Even though the District is now predominantly obscured by plowed farmland and roadways, a pristine 8-acre remnant of the original 170-acre chert quarry still exists in a small woods, alongside 7 acres of restored prairie and grassland. That 15-acre portion of the quarry site, purchased by The Archaeological Conservancy (TAC) in 1994, is separately known as "The Grand Meadow Chert Quarry Archaeological and Cultural Preserve."

This quarry is the only known culturally utilized source for "Grand Meadow Chert (GMC)," a distinctive hard, gray stone used by Native Americans to make many everyday tools including spear points, arrowheads, drills, awls, knives, and hide scrapers. The earliest known use of Grand Meadow Chert is from a bison kill site (21YM47) near Granite Falls, Minnesota, in a context that was C-14 dated to 7700-8000 B.P. Grand Meadow Chert is now known to have been used at archaeological sites in 52 counties in Minnesota. For thousands of years, the small number of GMC tools found at sites throughout the region can be accounted for by people who collected nodules that were found eroding from the banks of the two creeks that cut through the District. Eventually, increased Native populations and the preference for use of GMC as a tool stone for making hide scrapers may have increased demand and inspired people to dig the first pits to expand access to the buried stone.

Rediscovering the GMCQ

The abandoned chert quarry pits went unrecognized for centuries, and were eventually filled in for farming in the 19th and 20th centuries. There is no known record of this chert source among the oral histories of the Dakota-speaking communities of the region. It was the astute observations by a prominent local stone and artifact collector, Maynard Green, that led to recognizing the significance of the many remnant pits in the small oak woods within the District. Mr. Green wrote to a leading archaeologist, Lloyd Wilford, in 1952, but failed to attract professional interest until 1980. In that year, Green met with a team from the Minnesota Statewide Archaeological Survey led by archaeologist Tom Trow. Green showed the team the pits hidden in the small woods, and the Grand Meadow Chert Quarry was then added to the state site file. Trow first presented the site to the 1981 meeting of the Council for Minnesota Archaeology. Additional efforts by Orrin Shane and Tim Ready at the Science Museum of Minnesota led to the 1994 NRHP nomination and the permanent protection of the Preserve by the TAC. In 2022 an archaeology team from Hamline University did the first research within the District, and returned in 2023 with their field school.

Public access and interpretation within the GMCQ Preserve are being developed though a partnership among the Mower County Historical Society, the Prairie Island Indian Community, and The Archaeological Conservancy. The self-guided walking tour along the new "Wanhi Yukan Trail" will open to the public in the Spring of 2025.

Grand Meadow chert with a fossil embedded inside.

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