The Lake Shore District

 

 

Lyman Lake an old one

Evidence points to the lake in section 7 of Lyman Township to be an old one. 

 

 

 

Amos Arnold was the first to farm that area, and once the soil had been plowed and drained, a variety of artifacts of native American activity was found.

 

Some of the items are on display at the Ford County Courthouse courtesy of the Arnold family and Seward Arnold in particular, who for years would bring people into his home in Roberts to view his family's collection of spear points, axe heads, arrow points, scrapers, and hide-working tools.

June Arnold, who lives in Roberts, has some of the axe heads and stone hammers, and said that professors from the University of Illinois dated the tools at about 3,000 years old -- making the activity at the Lyman lake to be happening at least a thousand years before the birth of Christ.

Much of the prairie has no paths or tracks, with miles covered by big bluestem, but in such spots as the Roberts Grove, Oliver's Grove and the Lyman Lake, native Americans would settle.  They would use wood to heat and cook, and they would hunt the animals and birds that used the lake for feeding.  They would also fashion tools from rocks they would find.

Seward Arnold, in an interview in 1980 when he was 99 years old, said that for some time the land closest to where the lake had been was allowed to remain in grasses.  But when he began plowing the grasses, he said that in the first light of morning he could catch glitters in the fresh sod, the debris of chipping stones by Indians for centuries as they labored to make spears and arrows.  The glitter came from the fragments of granite and agate left behind from the chipping.

 

--Paxton Record.  26 August 1998.  Larry Knilands.