A Franklin County map from 1892 of “ancient earthworks,” or Native American burial mounds and other structures, may show that Shrum Mound on the near West Side does have a sibling mound nearby, after all.

The map, uncovered by fringe historian and author Fritz Zimmeran, is pictured above with an arrow pointing to two mounds. One of those dots is believed to be Shrum Mound (pictured on right), which is on present-day McKinley Avenue. It is one of region’s last remaining conical Native American burial mounds. The Ohio History Connection believes it was constructed by the Adena people 2,000 years ago and possibly homage to a distant mountain.

No doubt, map making from the late 1800s was an imperfect task. Nevertheless, the map suggests there are two Adena burial mounds off McKinley Avenue, as amateur historians have speculated for decades. They have dubbed the second mound “Quarry Mound” (pictured on left) and Shrum Mound stands stoically in a small public park on the banks of the quarry roughly three hundred feet away.

However, the Ohio History Connection says they have no historical records of a second mound. If the second mound on this map is indeed a burial mound, it is now inside City property on an island in a rain-filled quarry surrounded by extremely polluted water.

This past summer, the Free Press published a story about how a City of Columbus de-watering project could finally solve the mystery, but a historical mystery they may not want to unravel. If “Quarry Mound” is what the amateur historians believe, the financial implications for the City of Columbus could be severe considering the First Nations’ are pushing their “Land Back” movement like never before.

Given the acronym “MAQ” (McKinley Avenue Quarry) by the Columbus Division of Water, the quarry is a half mile in length and surrounded by a tall fence and bushes. Sometime in the 1800s or early 1900s, thousands of Italian immigrants making $1 a day hacked out limestone from this quarry with pickaxes. Decades later, after the limestone was extracted, the quarry turned into a lake. 

In the 1970s the City turned the MAQ into a dumping grounds of sorts. Making it a “sludge repository” for residuals filtered out of local drinking water treatment plants, such as alum and lime. Currently, a thick green and yellow foam rests on the top of MAQ’s northern half.

The City is in the midst of spending tens of millions to dredge the MAQ because it “has limited remaining service life under the current disposal rates of residuals,” as stated by an Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) review of the project.

Some of Central Ohio’s earthworks were designated a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) site in 2023, a monumental achievement for the Ohio History Connection. Decades before this, amateur archeologists and historians scoured forests and farmland searching for lost mounds and continue to do so. There are hundreds of local Native American earthworks which could be described as a “Ghost Mounds.” Destroyed by a farmer’s plow, a developer’s backhoe, or simply lost to time and history.

“What I did do was to hike up the Shrum Mound in the winter and check the island out through binoculars,” Ohio University’s Alex Armstrong told the Free Press this past summer. Armstrong is a graduate student who researches Ohio Valley earthworks sites. “I’ve done a lot of searching for mounds in the woods over the years, and what I saw with the leaves all down sure looked like it could be.”

Armstrong continued, “There has been so much careless destruction of mounds and other cultural sites over the years, but every now and then you find a really cool story of somebody taking the initiative to save one. It would be a very cool story, but by no means unbelievable, if some quarry manager way back when had managed to get the mound spared.”

Fringe historian Zimmerman – a fringe historian because he’s theorized that giants migrated to North America around 7,000 BC – uncovered the 1892 map trying to prove that Shrum Mound has a sibling mound. And while the Ohio History Connection scoffs at such things (giants), and even goes so far as to ban fringe historian Graham Hancock from Serpent Mound, what cannot be denied is the attention and admiration both Zimmerman and Hancock have received for the work they have done. Hancock’s books have sold tens of millions of copies, and his series “Ancient Apocalypse” is one of Netflix’s most watched series.

Zimmerman’s books haven’t reached the popularity of Hancock’s, but his 12-year journey investigating 700 hundred earthworks in Ohio and across the Midwest is, at the very least, intriguing – whether one chooses to believe his theories or not.

The reality is, it was Zimmerman who took the time and effort to dig out (so to speak) the map from 1892, which he found in the “History of the city of Columbus, capital of Ohio.”

“Finding the documentation just takes a little work, which the Ohio History Connection is too lazy to do. And they are the anointed experts?” wrote Zimmerman on his web site. “With the 1892 map, the question is settled. Someone needs to send this information to the Ohio History Connection so they can ‘discover’ the Quarry Mound. Your tax dollars at work in Ohio.”

The Free Press did forward the map to the Ohio History Connection (OHC), and they believe the mounds pinpointed by Zimmerman are considerably north of “Quarry Mound.”

“The identified location is far into Norwich Township, with the island and Shrum Mound being on the northern edge of Franklin Township,” said OHC spokesperson Neil Thompson to the Free Press. “With the 1892 map likely predating the quarry and lacking indication of a mound, it might be a historic-era grave or small family cemetery plot. And it might also be a smaller glacial deposit mimicking a mound often found in Central Ohio and mistaken as being manmade.”

He says Hilliard is on the map and designated by the number “17,” and the two mounds are southeast of here, which would be an accurate direction towards Shrum Mound.

“The 1892 map shows Shrum in the middle of Norwich Township. Why are they talking about Franklin Township? There is no glacial kame in the world that is 100-foot in diameter. What a joke,” said Zimmerman to the Free Press.