Cluttered Attic Reveals Rare Artifacts, Some Dating Back 5,000 Years

A Michigan family has donated 120 artifacts collected over several decades from their family farm to the Eaton Rapids Area Historical Society. (Photo via Facebook)

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Arrowheads, the broken pieces of a peace pipe and pieces of tools used by American Indians are part of a rare collection of 5,000-year-old artifacts found recently in a cluttered and dusty Michigan attic.

Brooke Ellsworth told The Lansing State Journal she grew up hearing stories about her great-grandfather, Clyde Ellsworth, turning up stones with his horse-drawn plow on an Eaton County farm that has remained in her family since 1937.

Ellsworth rediscovered more than 120 valuable relics after her grandmother, Beverly, died in June. She had inherited them and kept them among other keepsakes in the attic of her Springport home.

“She was kind of a clean hoarder,” she said. “She didn’t like to throw things away and she had so much stuff. There was still furniture from the 50s in the attic.”

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The Ellsworth family has donated the collection to the Eaton Rapids Area Historical Society. What makes the collection rare, historical society vice president Deb Malewski said, is that its pieces were collected from the same 140-acre tract of land, and it was kept together for decades by the same family.

“If all this came from one farm, this is not your normal find,” she said. “This isn’t, somebody picks up an arrowhead out in the farmer’s field. This means something more than a causal find.This is too much and in too good of shape to just have been a random thing. This is a sign of some kind of settlement.”

Stacy Tchorzynski, an archaeologist with the Michigan State Historical Preservation Office, said the items in the collection are in good shape. Because it hasn’t been scattered, officials are better able to date them.

Some of the pieces are 350 years old (Late Woodland period) and others date back 5,000 years (Late Archaic period), substantiating what has long been known: The prairie, The Ellsworth farm is on high ground between the Grand and Kalamazoo rivers, was inhabited for centuries by American Indians.

“It looks like people were living there for several thousands of years on and off,” Tchorzynski said. “People kept coming back and back over the years there.”

William Lovis, an anthropology professor at Michigan State University and a curator at the MSU Museum, said the artifacts may hold clues about how ancient populations lived.

A ceramic pot with trace amounts of burned food, for example, “can be carbon dated,” Lovis said. “Looking at the chemistry of the food can tell us what plants and animals are there. You can tell generally what they were cooking in the pot. That’s all from a few milligrams of burned on food.”

Tchorzynski said the value of the Ellsworth historical site, the county’s 138th designated historical site and one of about 22,000 in Michigan, “can’t be measured.”

Some of the sites were American Indian settlements; others pioneer homestead or logging sites. About 1,500 shipwrecks and other underwater sites are also designated historical sites.

“Each site is its own unique story,” she said. “These are things to treasure.”