Ancient Mound

Duane's take

Here's how the marker tells it, and I'm passing it straight along to you. Mound Street, Nacogdoches — now that is a name with a story baked right into it. Back in the eighteenth century, this street got its name from mounds.

Not one mound, not two — mounds, plural, lining the road all the way from Main Street to King Street. Built by prehistoric Indians, every last one of them. Just think about what that stretch must have looked like, that long procession of earthworks standing alongside what would one day become a Texas town.

One by one, over time, they went. Demolished, gone, swallowed up by the march of everything that came after. All except one.

This one. The sole survivor of the whole line. And what do we have left from the others?

Well, when one of those mounds was demolished — one that measured a hundred and fifty feet by seventy-five feet, which is no small pile of earth, friends — the pottery that came out of it was preserved. You can find it today at Old Stone Fort, on the campus of Stephen F. Austin State College.

The mound itself is gone, but what the people who built it left inside it endured. One mound still standing, a museum case of pottery from the rest, and a street name carrying the memory of all of them. Mound Street.

Now you know what it's holdin'.

What the marker says

Mound Street got its name in the 18th century from mounds which lined it from Main to King Street. These were built by prehistoric Indians. Only this one remains. Pottery from a demolished mound that measured 150 by 75 feet is preserved in Old Stone Fort, Stephen F. Austin State College. (1966)