The fascinating case of a missing archeological discovery in Brown County has taken up my entire day, and I’m no closer to understanding this story than I was when I started. The need to investigate began with an article I ran into by the Pecan Valley Genealogical Society from 2022. The article is reported to be an extract from the April 17, 1903, edition of the Brownwood Bulletin, describing a strange skull that was found in the county, near the now defunct community of Elkins. I immediately felt like I’d stepped into an episode of the History Channel’s tales of missing giants.
“Brownwood Doctor Has Rare Old Skull”, the headline reads. “Dr. W. B. Anderson of this city has in his possession what is undoubtedly the skull of a human who existed many centuries ago. It was found in a vault built of stone, buried beneath the ground. In the same inclosure were the skulls and some of the bones of five human beings.” We are told the skull was nearly twice as long as it was ‘deep’, with a protruding jawline and that the individual to whom this odd relic once belonged had only 20 teeth, vs the normal 32. “The lower jaw protrudes so and the upper part of the face slants back at such a sharp facial angle that the upper teeth have to stick out almost horizontally to meet the lower, and yet they articulate perfectly.”
Okay. That’s pretty wild. The first thing I did was to attempt to look up that article, just to make sure this wasn’t a joke. That edition of the Bulletin for 1903 does not appear to be online. I went down to the genealogical library to see if they had it, but it wasn’t that simple. It might be on a roll of microfilm that holds about 10 years of newspaper records, and which, naturally, has to be the one that has viewing problems. Even with the help of a nice gentleman there, I was unable to verify the article. That doesn’t mean it’s not there, it probably is, but this edition appears to be very difficult to locate. “Of course, it is”, my conspiracy theorist self whispers.
The story does appear in several other Texas newspapers, and something about it appears to be in an edition of The New York Times from 1904, but I couldn’t bring myself to pay to read that. The Southern Mercury out of Dallas ran an article about the Brown County find on Thursday, April 16, 1903, as did the Banner-Leader. (Ballinger), on May 2, 1903.
These articles, all with the same text, explain that, “W. F. Grogan, a farmer, found a buried vault of stone, in which were the skulls and some of the bones of five human beings. One of the skulls was brought to Brownwood and is now here in a physician’s office. The facial angle, which is nearly 90 degrees in the human being of this generation, does not in this specimen 45 degrees.” There were more mounds that were supposed to be excavated, according to the story. “Several similar mounds are to be found in the same neighborhood, and while they have not been examined, are believed to contain similar specimens. This discovery will likely prove, of great interest to archaeologists of the country.”
With the Unsolved Mysteries theme song playing in my head, I checked out both the Brownwood residents cited in the news reports. Dr. Anderson, it turns out, was a longtime physician in town, having begun his Brownwood practice in 1894. He worked as an ear, nose and throat physician and had offices above the Brownwood National Bank building. Anderson practiced here until at least 1941, died in 1943, and is buried at Greenleaf Cemetery.
The farmer, W. F. Grogan did seemingly live in Elkins. Grogan was born in Alabama, in 1862, moved to Brown County and had several children born there. He died in 1954, at the age of 92, and is buried at Elkins Cemetery. From what I can gather, the land Grogan owned might well have ended up as part of Camp Bowie. Interestingly, there have been some very old archeological finds on the Camp Bowie property, some of which I wrote about a few months back. Could those be the mounds spoken of in the articles?
What happened to the skulls and bones that were recovered from the first mound, or was the whole story just a hoax? I’m betting it wasn’t. I think if you are going to name names of local people in the town newspaper, especially someone well known like the town doctor, what you say had better have some basis in fact. Maybe Dr. Anderson donated the skull to a museum, or perhaps he stuffed them in a box in the attic and forgot about them?
There are a lot of stories in the same time period, around 1900 or so, about other strange archeological investigations in North America which also seem to have disappeared. Many artifacts from these sites have been ‘lost’ by various institutions. Maybe it was because the discoveries didn’t fit the established narrative? I don’t know, but it is strange that the Brown County prehistoric burial site story just drops away. At any rate, these reports do leave us with our own ancient mystery, maybe even worthy of a History Channel segment, right?
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Diane Adams is a local journalist whose columns appear Thursdays on BrownwoodNews.com. Comments regarding her columns can be emailed to [email protected].
