Crystal Lake planners are requiring the owner of a trailer park on the city’s eastern border to determine whether Native American burial mounds are located on the property before proceeding with an expansion project.
The project would more than double the number of homes at the Oakbrook Estates trailer park.
Michelle Rentzsch, Crystal Lake planner, said an anonymous caller told her the trailer park may be on a Native American burial site. Rentzsch said the possible existence of the mounds were confirmed by Chuck Spinelli, the city’s cartographer, who months ago came across a spot designated as “Indian burial” on an old county map while researching a different project.
“What I’ve seen appears to be what is known as an effigy mound,” said Spinelli, who has visited Oakbrook Estates on a few occasions. “Down in Cahokia, in southern Illinois, they have the effigy mound that’s shaped like a big snake. The one I’ve seen on (Oakbrook Estates) is smaller than that (and) looks like a berm that can be seen from Sands Road.”
The city is asking owner Robert Novelle, a Chicago attorney, to work with the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency to determine if his 67-acre parcel has a Native American burial site.
The property owner insists the whole thing is a mistake. “I’ve owned that property since 1969 and have been over every inch of it,” Novelle said. “I can assure you there are no burial mounds on it.”
Novelle appeared before the Crystal Lake Zoning Board of Appeals recently, requesting that the site be annexed by Crystal Lake so he can tap into the city’s sewer and water services. About 170 mobile homes are located on the steep, wooded property. Novelle wants to add 285 homes and develop a 6-acre parcel along U.S. Highway 14 as a commercial project.
The Zoning Board voted 4-1 to approve Novelle’s plan.
Rochelle Lurie, with Harvard-based Midwest Archaeology Services Inc., said identifying a burial mound cannot be done by just looking at it. Analyses of soil samples are needed to determine if a burial mound is authentic.
“When glaciers retreated from this area, they left deposits of what may look like burial mounds,” Lurie said. “You need to obtain and analyze the actual soil covering the mound, bone and pottery fragments, arrowheads, things of that nature, to determine if a mound is authentic. And the bones have to be dated.”
Lurie said Native Americans, from about 2,000 years ago to about the time white settlers arrived, buried their dead within mounds on high ground, at times on the shores of streams and lakes.
Lurie is a professional archeologist who is hired by state and local governments and private companies to unearth and identify sites of historic significance. Under state law, a burial mound cannot be disturbed, she said.
Lurie added that there have been occasions where burial-site claims have been made in order to stall developments.
Crystal Lake resident Nancy Marcotte, a member of the Sauk Trail chapter of the Illinois Association for the Advancement of Archaeology, said she had not heard that there were burial mounds in the area.
“Very few burial mounds are recorded in McHenry County,” Marcotte said. “The ones that have been identified are along the Fox River.
“Once they’re discovered, they should be protected. They become an attraction and are usually destroyed by people that we call `pot hunters,’ who are after arrowheads and clay pots and goodies like that and do not care about the dead person in the mound or the scientific or historic significance.”
