Knapsack: Reconsidering the past in a complex present

Of all the characters in Licking County history who are important to me, though we’ve never met, Warren K. Moorehead is near the top of the list.

I’ve had the honor and pleasure of actually impersonating Chaplain David Jones and William Gavit in marking bicentennial events for the state of Ohio and Centenary United Methodist Church in Granville, but Moorehead is someone whose life I’ve gotten to inhabit in a variety of less dramatic ways. Born in 1866, died in 1939, he's a living presence for me in this area. His mother died when he was very young; her father Joseph Warren King was a benefactor of Shepardson College, building King Hall in 1891 which was recently renovated for its continued service to now Denison University.

Warren King Moorehead started at Denison in 1886 but never completed a degree; he spent too much time exploring the countryside and engaging in "antiquarian activities" — the term archaeology had barely come into usage at this time. The dropout later received an honorary doctorate from Denison in 1930, by which time he was called "the dean of American archaeology."

My primary point of access to the more everyday fellow has been his voluminous collection of papers resident in the Ohio History Connection (OHC) archives, including diaries. Moorehead, especially the younger Warren, was writing very much for a future audience. It can be bracing to turn a yellowed sheet of paper and continue a sentence as he writes in 1901 about "some future reader of these pages" and how he hopes they will understand his circumstances. That plea has stuck with me.

One challenge for anyone involved in contemporary archaeology looking back at him is that he was a pioneer, but as a pathbreaker, he broke quite a bit along the way. His methods, especially in his early years, were atrocious; his ethics about collecting and selling artifacts were not at all what would be tolerated today. I’ve defended him in other settings with the point, easily established in the archives, that his boards and supervisors as he served as the first curator for the then Ohio Archaeological & Historical Society (OAHS), and first professor of archaeology for The Ohio State University, told him to sell the duplicate artifacts he found to fund his budgets. The 1890s were a "wild west" in many ways, in Ohio as well as beyond the Mississippi.

What I find compelling about Moorehead’s story, though, is how he learned and grew. He was a plunderer and pillager in his digging, by any standards then or now, but he was also a preservationist. His work is a primary reason Fort Ancient became our first state park in 1891, and he was a key figure in the beginning of the work of the OAHS, now OHC, as it opened its first museum in what’s now Orton Hall on the OSU campus. His methods improved over the years.

His approach to Native American antiquities and human remains was, frankly, horrible in his youth. He also was present at Wounded Knee in 1890, just 26 years old. In the years after witnessing that slaughter, he became such an advocate of Native American rights and justice he was forced off a federal panel defending tribal sovereignty in 1933, a 67-year-old threat to entrenched interests.

Warren K. Moorehead learned and grew; a hundred years later, so can we.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s also a long-time volunteer for the OHC around Licking County. Tell him how you’ve learned and grown in understanding the past at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Newark Advocate: Knapsack: Reconsidering the past in a complex present