Bronze Statue of Columbian Mammoth
We visited the Lubbock Lake Landmark on a beautiful winter day in February. Nothing had greened up yet and from the pictures it looks bleak and cold. It was actually in the 60s and was shirtsleeve weather. From the parking lot several life-size bronze statues of some of the extinct animals are visible.
Few people in the area are aware of the historic and prehistoric importance of the Lubbock Lake site. In fact, when I told a friend that I was going there, she assumed I was going fishing. There is no water and no fish in Lubbock Lake.
The importance of Lubbock Lake Landmark is that it contains evidence of almost continuous human occupation starting back over 11,500 and possibly even further based on some recent findings to Singer’s Store, established in 1879 as the first business in Lubbock County. There are few sites in the US as complete and extant.
One day in 1936, two young boys, Clark and Turner Kimmel, who were cousins, were watching workers dredging out a spot where a small pond had once existed. The workers mistakenly thought that the pond was spring-fed and that by digging it out, the spring might start flowing again. The pond was actually fed by the water table, which over the years had dropped due to increased irrigation in the area.
The boys found in the soil removed by the workers an arrowhead along with some old bones. They took their discovery to Dr. W. Curry Holden, who was the director of the West Texas Museum and a professor of History at Texas Technological College. He identified the arrowhead as a Folsom point which dates back over 10,000 years. Of even greater significance both was the fact that the bones found with the point were from extinct animals that died off during the Holocene extinction event when large mammals such as the giant ground sloth, the mammoth, the short-faced bear and giant armadillo disappeared. During 1939-41, the first professional excavations were conducted by WPA archeologists. From that point, the secret of Lubbock Lake was secret no longer.
Installment 1
