Advocates fear development along Riverfront Parkway will destroy a piece of American Indian history [photos]

The Citico Mound is shown in this photograph made during the Civil War.
The Citico Mound is shown in this photograph made during the Civil War.

The Citico Mound has already been decimated twice for the sake of progress, once when it was leveled during the construction of Riverfront Parkway in 1915 and again when its remnants were destroyed during the road's widening in 1957.

Now advocates of the area's American Indian heritage fear that the historically significant site is in danger of again being disturbed, and forgotten altogether, as development looms in the area more than 100 years after the mound was neglected the first time.

An extensive development plan for a 650-acre tract of land primarily covering the Lincoln Park neighborhood and a former industrial site along Riverfront Parkway is expected to extend Central Avenue to Riverfront Parkway and bring new retail and residential offerings to the area, including an apartment complex that Chattanooga Intertribal Council member Tom Kunesh said will stand where the Citico Mound once did.

That mound, he said, was not just any American Indian site.

"It was the major town site of Chattanooga," Kunesh said of the mound, which he pinpoints as having been near what is now the Boathouse Restaurant but on the south side of Riverfront Parkway. "With a major town site comes a major cultural center and burials, and we don't want burials removed or destroyed."

Much of the land is already in the hands of private developers, and Kunesh said he fears that, potentially, there could be hundreds of burials on the land that will be uprooted in the development process.

The project has been in the works since 2013 after a $200,000 Environmental Protection Agency Brownfield Area-Wide Planning grant helped spark the planning process. The site was eligible for the grant because of the environmental challenges it faces due to the 20th century industrial presence that further tarnished the area.

The Regional Planning Agency's 146-page Third to Riverside plan that will function as a guide for the area's future is scheduled for an August vote. The plan, in its current form, delves deeply into the cultural significance of Lincoln Park, highlights several other landmarks within the project's scope and explains the provisions being made to preserve them.

It does not mention the Citico site, however, except to list its identification code as it is on the National Register of Historic Places, 40HA65. The plan's lack of acknowledgment for the Citico site is troubling to the Intertribal Council, whose leaders say that have not been consulted at any point in the planning process for the Third to Riverside project.

"I think the main reason it has slipped through the cracks is because it's gone," said Nicholas Honerkamp, an archaeologist at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga who has studied the Citico site. "There aren't any remains that you can call Citico Mound or Citico Village. The whole area has been paved, and much of the property has industrial fill on it. Who knows what that's going to involve? There are no remnants that you can see, that are visible."

While the legacy of Chief John Ross - for whom Ross's Landing is named - may be more familiar to some local residents, Citico existed well before Ross came to Chattanooga, and it was the major American Indian site in the area.

Known for its platform mound and pyramid, it was an important regional site and a hub of the Coosa Confederacy.

Southeastern Development Associates of Augusta, Ga., is planning an apartment complex in the brownfield area. Chris Senn, the vice president of the company, said the company relies on the information provided by local planning agencies when determining the historical significance of a potential building site.

He added that the company met with local neighborhoods about the upcoming project.

"Our view of it is the good news is we're re-purposing a site," he said. "We like taking a site like this one that has a lot of environmental issues and is pretty much asphalt and concrete and redeveloping it where it fits with the input from the community on what they would like to see."

Kunesh said he would like to see the mound rebuilt, like the mounds in Renaissance Park, and the housing development be constructed elsewhere.

"Housing can be built anywhere," he said. "It's not dependent on that site. It can be moved, and as Chattanooga has destroyed 99 percent of Native American sites in the area, it would be a good thing to both preserve the site and recreate the mound."

Tennessee Ancient Sites Conservancy president and Chattanooga resident Mark Tolley agreed.

"People will come to Chattanooga to see these native sites," Tolley said. "People will come to Tennessee to see these things. They just give us another way to bring in tourists. There's a beautiful story to tell, and it goes through thousands of years."

Honerkamp wrote a column about the Citico Mound for the Times Free Press in 2015, calling its erasure a "sad reminder that there are sometimes substantial costs to modernization and development."

He also asked in his column how such a substantial and interesting prehistoric monument could vanish from view from our collective memory.

His opening line "out of sight, out of mind" may have answered the question.

"In a meta sense, I think Tom is right on the dot when he points out that there wasn't any involvement (in the Third to Riverside plan) by Native Americans in an area that had an extensive Native American site," Honerkamp said Thursday. "The courtesy of that would've been nice. I can understand how this could happen.

"I'm not justifying it, but the physical remains are gone, so I guess it's not high on the radar list."

The council is planning a prayer gathering in the Citico site area Sunday morning as part of the National Day of Prayer for Native American Sacred Places.

Though the mound is gone and the land tainted by industry, the significance of Citico remains to those with American Indian heritage.

"To us, it doesn't matter if it's petroleum polluted," Kunesh said. "The burials are still there."

Contact staff writer David Cobb at dcobb@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6249.

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