Qualla: Criel Mound

Criel Mound: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Josh Stapler from Charleston, United States, CC BY 2.0. In a small municipal park called Staunton Park, in the middle of South Charleston, West Virginia, there is a hill that is not a hill. The earth rises out of the surrounding street grid in a smooth conical shape, about 33 feet high and 173 feet across at the base. It was built by hand, basket by basket, more than two thousand years ago. The people who built it belonged to what archaeologists now call the Adena culture - one of the earliest mound-building societies in eastern North America - and the structure they left is the second-largest surviving burial mound in West Virginia. Today the locals call it the Criel Mound. To the people who built it, around 250-150 BC, it was a piece of a much larger sacred landscape that stretched eight miles along the upper Kanawha River.

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Image: Josh Stapler from Charleston, United States | CC BY 2.0

Criel Mound: An Indigenous Capital

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David G. Simpson, Public domain. When the archaeologist Cyrus Thomas surveyed the Kanawha Valley in the 1880s on behalf of the Smithsonian's Bureau of Ethnology, he counted fifty mounds along the river terraces near present-day Charleston. They ranged from three feet to thirty-five feet in height, and they sat a...

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Image: David G. Simpson | Public domain

Criel Mound: Horse Races and a Judges' Stand

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David G. Simpson, Public domain. In the 1830s, the residents of South Charleston used the mound as the centerpiece of a horse-racing track. The course ran in a wide loop around the base. In 1840, they leveled the top of the mound to install a wooden judges' stand, removing what was probably the original conical ...

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Image: David G. Simpson | Public domain

Criel Mound: What the Earth Held

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David G. Simpson, Public domain. Thirteen skeletons lay inside the Criel Mound - two near the top, eleven at the base. The base burials were the centerpiece of the find. A single very large skeleton occupied the center, surrounded by ten others arranged in a spoke-like pattern, their feet pointing inward toward ...

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Image: David G. Simpson | Public domain

Criel Mound: What Remains

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Harper1040, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Criel Mound is now the centerpiece of Staunton Park, a small municipal park maintained by the city of South Charleston. The site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. On any given weekend, it serves as the gathering place for local arts and crafts fairs, revi...

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Image: Harper1040 | CC BY-SA 4.0