Up to Parr — A collection for the ages
C.R. Nelson
Waynesburg University teacher and head librarian Rae Redd gives Frank Hunter one of the archival boxes the Parr collection will be stored in.
C.R. Nelson
Frank Hunter holds an arrowhead.
Intern Grace Zabloski works to categorize items
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C.R. Nelson/For the Observer-Reporter
Intern Grace Zabloski works to categorize items
Waynesburg University President Douglas Lee, left, with Frank Hunter
C.R. Nelson
This Point Hope, Ala., hammer is being studied at Waynesburg University along with various other artifacts.
Reference materials
C.R. Nelson
Frank Hunter points at bone needles
By C.R. Nelson
The Martin Room on the second floor of Waynesburg University’s Miller Hall lives up to its name – those logs incorporated into one wall are from the cabin where Governor Edward Martin (1873-1967) was born. The room is a tribute to a Waynesburg College graduate who fought in three wars, went on to become state governor 1943-47, U.S. senator 1948-58, then came home to rest in Green Mount Cemetery on the hill above campus. Local history like this is baked into the old buildings of W.U.; every room and hallway has a story to tell. But these days, the collection of indigenous artifacts from the long-lost Walter M. Parr collection has taken center stage.
Step into the Martin Room, and you’ll find the portrait of Governor Martin and his wife looking down on tables filled with flint arrowheads, spear points and tools, pieces already identified by retired West Greene history teacher Frank Hunter and student intern Grace Zabloski. Bit by bit and shard by shard, the artifacts Parr collected from all over North America from Point Hope, Alaska to the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico are being identified from reference books, entered into notebooks, photographed, bagged and labeled.
It’s been six months of painstaking research to get this far, and there are thousands more pieces to go.
One look at the crumbling cards of unidentified chert spilling on tables, and the weight of time becomes palpable. This is a project 15,000 years in the making. What’s another year or two spent learning from it?
You can tell by the smile that never seems to leave Frank Hunter’s face that “Hunter’s Happy History” has never been happier.
Hunter’s involvement with this blast from the past is serendipity at its best. “My great-niece was looking at colleges, so I brought her here to tour the campus last August. That’s when I ran into Rae Redd. I used to send students to his library to do research if they couldn’t find the information at school. He said, ‘come here, Frank. I have something to show you, and he took us to the Martin Room.” There, spread on tables and lurking in boxes, were just some of the Parr collection that had been archived for decades in the storage rooms of Stewart Hall.
Earlier in the summer, Parr’s granddaughter, Jenny Gaus of New Jersey, contacted university president Doug Lee. She wanted to see the collection that Parr had donated to college museum curator James “Fuzzy” Randolph more than forty years ago and planned to arrive at the end of September.
Hunter remembers laughing and saying, “You have a big job ahead of you!” And Redd laughing and saying, “No, you do.”
By the time Gaus arrived, Hunter had used his high school teaching smarts along with his admittedly amateur background in archaeology to create an impressive PowerPoint presentation. It included a map showing 34 states where the artifacts were gathered, along with what modern archaeology has to say about origin and place in carbon-dated time. The presentation also included a portion of Parr’s collection from the university museum archives that painted a picture of the past stretching from the late paleo era, 15,000-10,000 years before present, to the contact years of colonial times.
After her visit, Gaus was given a tour of the Greene County Historical Museum collections by museum director Matt Cumberledge that included a drive around the county ending where the Warrior Trail connects with the Monongahela River in
Greensboro and Hunter got back to work. He was now caught up in a project of even greater proportions – cataloging then digitizing the entire Parr collection for all to ultimately access online.
Hunter was about to become a self-taught expert on PowerPoints of the past.
The official Overstreet 14th edition of Indian Arrowheads Identification, which can be searched by state and North American Projectile Points, listed in alphabetical order, would be his go-to resource books.
“When I find it in one, I verify in the other. So far, I’ve only had one point I couldn’t find – a calvert from the Woodland culture, which I found online at Native American Projectile Point Identification.”
Hunter began identifying then photographing all the arrowheads he had laid out for Gaus, first by state, focusing on Pennsylvania and surrounding regions, then beyond.
When the first week of the second term arrived, senior Grace Zablosky became Hunter’s independent study intern. Zablosky, a public and applied history major, has been volunteering at the historical society since she was a freshman. The Parr project would be a perfect fit.
Just like the kid in us who marveled over an arrowhead, the feel of flint is the first wow moment, even before the fluted edges let you know this is the real historic deal. It has a luster found in sedimentary rock that contains silicon dioxide from the living organisms that got added to the layers of silt as the earth’s plates shifted, folded, rose and eroded for millions of years. Flint comes in many colors depending on location, another clue for kids who grow up to be archaeologists. Those points of origin also mark the trails where trade routes formed during those thousands of years as the first nomadic hunters crossed the Bering Straights from Asia to the Americas, making their stone, flint and bone tools that would be traded, bartered or lost along the way.
Hunter rolled a large flint point between his fingers and held it up.
“This is called an ovate knife blade, Woodland culture, 3,000-2,000 before present. It can be found throughout the north and southeastern states to the upper Midwest and down to the Carolinas. It’s fairly common. We have one in the collection from Fayette County from the Monongalia culture.” By this time A.D. 1050 to 1635 in present-day, there were stockade villages where men hunted, and women planted the three sister crops – corn as a support for squash and beans. Beans climbed the corn, and the broad squash leaves helped retain water in the soil.
“And yes, they did use fish to fertilize the soil.”
Hunter pointed out that the notch on arrow and spearheads tells the age. Clovis, from roughly 13,000 years ago, had no notches and can be found across the United States. These were the premier projectile points that probably drove mammoths, mastodons and cave bears to extinction as the hunter-gatherer migration continued south from California to Florida. A closely related but later Folsom point from the plains states and found in Greene County, probably as a trade item, is part of another university collection that Hunter caught sight of recently but is leaving for another day.
“I’m keeping my focus on the Parr collection now, and I’ll keep working on it until I’m done – or old age sets in!”
Zablosky will be graduating in May, but there’s plenty of work for new interns to be involved with going forward. Hunter is the first to admit.
He’s still hard at work identifying 78 arrowheads that fell off their crumbling cards and need to be individually documented and remounted.
And there’s still more to do. Intact cards of points wired to sturdy backings cover a table along a wall waiting to be photographed before being stored in layers sandwiched between bubble wrap in archival boxes.
“One backing is a barn calendar from 1916,” Hunter said. Many of the points have identifying sites and states handwritten on them, which will help in future identification.
“Our goal is to ultimately have everything online, and researchers can come by and ask to see a particular point that can be found in the index we’re building.”