Glen Fount

Glen Fount Plantation is an historic site with a prehistoric component, located in the Ohio River valley about 1 mile east of Brandenburg in Meade County. Intensively investigated during development of the Nucor Steel Mill, the site contains the core of a plantation established by the Moremen family in 1848 and operated through the Civil War and into the mid-twentieth century.

Located on a high river terrace, the site also contains dense archaeological deposits from repeatedly occupied prehistoric camps and stone tool manufacturing workshops. Investigations determined that later prehistoric peoples, especially during the Early Woodland Period, visited the site to mass-produce bifaces made from locally plentiful Wyandotte chert.

Caches

An account of his childhood at Glen Fount written by Horace Moremen documented that the two razed brick residences had originally been slave houses, and old photographs and air photo imagery confirmed their locations, but archaeological findings documented continued residential occupation in those buildings after Emancipation and well into the twentieth century. U.S. Census data suggest that one of those residences was occupied around 1910 by former slave Belle Baker, who had grown up at Glen Fount and returned there with her two teenage sons to work as a cook. Her boys appear to have cached a collection of curios and souvenirs in the West Slave House cellar where they lived. Items include a pocketknife, brass shotgun shells and bullet casings, a few coins, a commemorative token from the 1883 German-American Bicentennial, and a number of prehistoric projectile points.

 

This historic-era curio collection was not the only cache found at Glen Fount. A separate collection – this one some 3,000 years  old – was found in the yard outside the Big House outbuilding complex. It consisted of a cache of 12 early- to mid-stage bifaces, 2 cores, and a large flake tool – all made from Wyandotte chert – stored underground within an Early Woodland flintknapping workshop where Adena-style points were manufactured by Native American toolmakers.