Dunbar Mound

West Virginia Explorer editor David Sibray visits the Dunbar Mound at Shawnee Park in Dunbar, West Virginia.

The Dunbar Mound, or the Poorhouse Mound, rises from Shawnee Park in Dunbar, West Virginia, in Kanawha County. The Smithsonian Institution likely excavated it in 1884. The archaeologists’ findings suggest the Hopewellian mound builders built it between 1 and 500 A.D. At the mound’s base, excavators found a crematory basin and at least four skeletons higher up in the mound.

One of the largest groups of mounds in the U.S. existed in the valley of the Kanawha River at the present-day communities of Dunbar, Institute, and South Charleston. In 1883-84, Smithsonian workers recorded 50 mounds and at least 10 earthworks (low earthen embankments in geometric form). Great Smith Mound—35 ft. high and 175 feet in diameter—also stood in Dunbar. The Dunbar Mound in Shawnee Park and the Criel Mound in South Charleston are all that remain today of these prehistoric works.

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