Indianapolis News, November 11, 1967
Jennings County Indiana
"Remains Of Vanished Giants Found In State"
One of the strangest contributions ever to come to hand tells of the existence in what is now Indiana, long before statehood and even before the Indians came here, of a mysterious giant mound-builders race whose men were more than nine feet tall.
What's more the contributor of this odd information, Helen W. Ochs of Columbus, Ind., wrote that evidence of their one-time existence here still remains near Brewersville, Jennings County. She quoted from the geological report many years ago on Jennings County by W.W. Borden that the remains of the largest work of those moundbuilders in that country were to be seen on the bluffs 75 to 100 feet above Sand Creek in Sand Creek Township. The report added:
"It is a stone mound 71 feet in diameter, showing at this time a height of three to five feet above the surrounding surface. The exterior walls appear to be made of stones placed on edge but the central portion did not show any regular arrangement of the stones"
Mrs. Ochs said the first discovery of human skeletal remains in that mound was made in 1865 when a farmer, getting stone for a spring house, dug into "a sort of tomb" in which he found the skeleton of a small child.
She quoted George M. Robison, his son, as saying the top of the mound was not less than 30 feet above the level of the surrounding ground. He added:
"I well remember that several large forest trees were growing on the top. One was a white oak not less than three feet in diameter at the base"
The Discovery of the child's skeleton aroused much curiosity, causing several people to dig into the top of the mound and resulting in the finding of several other skeletons. Mrs. Ochs added:
"Some of them were bound with perfectly-preserved bands of cedar wrapped around their chest while others were charred, perhaps in observance of a religious rite. Weapons found with the skeletons were unlike those used by Indians"
She quoted Robison further as saying that no intelligent investigative work was conducted there until 1879, 14 years after the discovery of the mound. He continued:
"The state geologist brought a couple of men here, one from Cincinnati and one from New York, and with Dr. Charles Green of North Vernon, they made quite an extensive examination. Among other things found was the skeleton of a man, it was intact, or rather, I might say, the bones were not scattered. It measured nine feet, eight inches.
"There was sort of necklace of mica lying around the neck and down across the breast. At the feet stood a sort of 'image' made of burned clay with pieces of flint rock embedded in it"
Robison kept that image and some of the bones. Mrs. Ochs said that as late as 1937 bones of that giant were in a basket in the office of the Kellar Mill along Sand Creek about a mile below the mound's site:
"Kenneth Kellar, the grandson of Robison, remembers that basket of bones. He said the bones were lost when the 1937 flood washed out the office"
Robinson who told of seeing the huge skeleton exhumed added that, according to the men of science who were there, they were the remains of a white race that had inhabited that part of the country before the advent of the red man. He said there were no signs of anything like pottery, no signs of metal working of any kind, just simply the bones of a "dead and gone race of human beings that we today know practically nothing about. We know not whence they came or where they went"
Mrs. Ochs said that the giant-like race had worked hard to entomb its dead. The rocks in the mound had been placed end to end with no attempt to plaster or seal them together. She continued:
"Evidence that this mound was dug into has washed out until the one-time graves now are smooth indentations in the leaf-covered ground"
She said Edith Hale, a retired schoolteacher; Beulah Kellar Lowe, granddaughter, and Kenneth Kellar, the grandson of Robison, remembered the bones and image described by Robison.
"This I feel substantiates the findings under discussion," Mrs. Ochs concluded.
