Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
[S]ometime, perhaps 12,000 years ago, a woolly mammoth on a hillside in Mount Holly breathed its last. The massive creature, which stood as much as 11 feet tall and weighed upwards of six tons, might have died for any number of reasons – old age or disease, perhaps. It might even have found itself on the wrong end of a hunter’s spear. As odd as it is to consider, archeologists believe Paleo-Indians, Vermont’s earliest human inhabitants, might have encountered woolly mammoths.
However the mammoth met its end, its body lay undisturbed for millennia, until it was uncovered during the fall of 1848 by some undoubtedly surprised railroad workers. These were among the first woolly mammoth remains ever found in North American. Their discovery drew the public’s interest, but perhaps not as much as you might expect. In the mid-1800s, Americans were more interested in looking forward than back. People were excited about recent innovations like the advent of train travel, whose high speed was redefining how people thought about time and distance.
For those paying attention, however, the mammoth discovery was redefining how people understood the distant past. At the time, most people had trouble thinking of history stretching back more than about 6,000 years, based on their interpretation of the Bible. But finds like the mammoth bones suggested a far more ancient history.
“Extraordinary Fossils” was the headline the Burlington Free Press chose for a story it ran three weeks after the discovery. (The artifacts had been buried for perhaps a dozen millennia — so what if it took a few weeks for the news to get out?) The paper reported that the fossils were discovered 11 feet below the ground by railroad workers excavating a “muck pit” to clear the way for track construction. The area had apparently been marshy since the mammoth died, perfect conditions for preserving the fossils.
Newspapers reported that the first piece found was a massive fossilized tooth, a molar in fact, weighing more than seven pounds. Several days later, workers unearthed a decaying tusk, measuring four feet long and four inches in diameter.
Newspapers treated the discovery as interesting, but didn’t delve into what it revealed about the past. The New Hampshire Sentinel chalked the find up as just one of the inexplicable things that had been happening in Vermont lately, lumping it together with the story of Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who had recently survived an accident that shot an iron bar shot through his brain, and a report in the Rutland Herald of a man who had survived being struck by a lightning bolt that had badly burned his face and set his clothes alight. “Vermont is getting to be wonderful state,” the Sentinel commented.
If the general public’s interest in the fossils soon waned, scientists’ curiosity did not. Louis Agassiz, one of the foremost scientists of his day, understood the fossils’ significance. Agassiz had just immigrated to the United States from Switzerland to become a professor of zoology and geology at Harvard. After examining the fossils, Agassiz declared at an 1849 scientific convention in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that based on their appearance the tusk and tooth had come from a woolly mammoth, not from a mastodon as some supposed. (Though related, mammoths and mastodons were distinct species. Mammoths were slightly larger and lived on open tundra, as existed in Vermont during its prehistory, whereas mastodons lived in more forested areas. Furthermore, mammoths had curved tusks, unlike the mastodons’ straighter ones, and mammoths had a hump on their upper back and neck area that contained fat that helped them survive harsh winters.)
The presence of a mammoth in Vermont didn’t surprise Agassiz; in fact, it supported his theory of what life was like here at the end of the last ice age. While growing up in Switzerland, he had seen the effects caused by ancient glaciers and believed he saw signs that the same thing had happened in New England.
Scientists today believe Agassiz was right. A mile-thick ice sheet that once covered the region created the landforms we see today as it stretched south and later as it receded to the north. Mammals started entering Vermont as the ice sheet began to recede some 15,000 years ago. In addition to now-familiar species like eastern chipmunk, black bear, and white-tailed deer, Vermont was also home to elk, timber wolves, caribou, mastodons and woolly mammoths. The state might also have hosted sabertooth wild cats, giant ground sloth and giant short-faced bear.
Agassiz got more evidence in 1849 to support his theories of how different the region once was. Railroad workers made another perplexing discovery, this time in Charlotte. They found the fossilized skeleton of a 12-foot-long whale, since identified as a beluga. (Large transportation projects have a history of turning up important artifacts. Consequently, today archeologists do the digging before construction work begins.)
The whale’s discovery helped scientists understand that in place of current-day Lake Champlain, the region once had a much larger, salty water body, now called the Champlain Sea, which covered much of the western part of the state. The fossilized bones of the Charlotte Whale are on display at the Perkins Museum of Geology at the University of Vermont.
The fossilized bones of the Mount Holly Woolly Mammoth took a more circuitous route to their current homes. The fossils that were found consisted of two tusks, the large molar, some bones of the foot, and a rib. The Boston Evening Transcript reported on Dec. 26, 1848, that the “tusks and teeth” could be viewed at Henshaw & Son’s in that city. Samuel Henshaw was treasurer of the Rutland & Burlington Railroad. He apparently used his clout to obtain the fossils, which he displayed at his brokerage in Boston.
Henshaw offered the bones to Agassiz for his museum, but the scientist declined, saying that they would constitute the institution’s entire holdings, since the museum was still just a concept. The artifacts went instead to another researcher, J.C. Warren, who created the Warren Museum in Boston. In 1906, after Warren’s death, financier J.P. Morgan purchased Warren’s collections in order to obtain an intact mastodon skeleton that was part of it. He donated the collections, including the Vermont mammoth fossils, to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
A paleontologist at the museum, Vermont native Walter Granger, decided that the proper place for the Mount Holly artifacts was back at Harvard, since they had originally been offered to Agassiz, and Harvard had finally created a museum. Since 1920, when the transfer was made, Harvard has held the molar, nine bones of the foot and a rib in its collection.
The fate of the two tusks unearthed in Mount Holly, however, remains somewhat murkier. Zadock Thompson, the assistant state geologist at the time of the discovery, visited the site shortly after the fossils were found. He described two tusks being unearthed — one measuring 80 inches along its outer curve. The other he described as “badly broken,” though he didn’t provide any dimensions.
Thompson kept the large tusk for the State Cabinet, a state collection of artifacts, in Montpelier. One of the tusks, presumably the larger one, was later given to the University of Vermont. The university displayed it until several years ago, when the tusk was given, along with a cast of the mammoth tooth, as a long-term loan to the Mount Holly Community Historical Museum. But the tusk on display in Mount Holly measures only about four feet along its outer curve. Thompson noted that the larger tusk suffered shrinkage and cracking after being exposed to the air. Perhaps that explains how it lost nearly half its length since its discovery. What became of the “badly broken” tusk Thompson described is unknown.
In 2014, to add to its long and storied history, the mammoth’s tusk and molar received another distinction. The Vermont Legislature designated them jointly the “state terrestrial fossil.” The Charlotte Whale, which had been the sole official state fossil, now has to share the limelight in Vermont fossildom. It is now the state marine fossil.