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Beattie Park Mound Group
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| Location: | Rockford, Winnebago County, Illinois, USA |
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| Area: | 7.5 acres (30,000 m2) |
| Built: | c. 300-1100 C.E. |
| Architectural style: | Effigy mound |
| Governing body: | City of Rockford, Private Owner |
| NRHP Reference#: | 91000084 |
| Added to NRHP: | February 27, 1991 |
The Beattie Park Mound Group is a grouping of Late Woodland period Upper Mississippian Indian mounds located in downtown Rockford, Illinois, United States.
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The Beattie Park Mound Group is located in downtown Rockford, Illinois' Beattie Park. It consists of three conical mounds (one outside the park boundaries), an effigy mound in the shape of a turtle, and a linear mound.[1] Beattie Park is north of Park Avenue and south of Mound Avenue, but there is one mound remnant in front of the house at 509 Indian Terrace. On its west, the park is bounded by Main Street and to its east lies the Rock River.[2] Mounds are the most visible evidence of cultures which once exploited the plant and animal species that the mix of biomes in northern Illinois provided.[3]
Mound groupings, primarily located along waterways, as is the case with the Beattie Park Mounds, are found south of the conifer hardwood forests and stretch from the Upper Mississippi Valley to Lake Michigan. Mostly found north of the southern edge of the prairie (a line a few miles south of the Illinois-Wisconsin border) at the Rock River the mound groupings dip south into Illinois and continue west toward Dubuque, Iowa.[3]
The mounds and mound remnants in Beattie Park date from an era during the Late Woodland known as the Effigy mound Period. This period spanned from about 300-1100 C.E. and influenced the Upper Mississippi River Valley in Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Native American Mound builders were not a culture, per se, it is more likely that there were vast differences in culture associated with the groups building effigy mounds during the same time period.[3] The mounds in Beattie Park probably date from the early part of the time period 700-1100, when most of the effigy mounds seem to have been built. The effigy mound building tradition dates to as early as 300 C.E. and spans the entire period until the mid-17th century, when Europeans first landed on the North American continent.[2]
The grouping represents the remnants of an area of nine conical mounds, a linear mound an earthen embankment and two effigy mounds; a bird and a turtle.[2] Through the years, some of the mounds were destroyed or disturbed. When the Rockford Art Museum constructed a parking lot on North Main Street in the mid-1950s one of the conical mounds was destroyed. A ruined bird effigy was destroyed while the North Main Manor apartment building was under construction across Park Avenue from the mounds.[2]
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