The Big Mound of St. Louis

This boulder marks the vanished site of the Big Mound, a great earthwork that once towered over the riverfront. When the founders of Saint Louis arrived, it was the largest of a cluster of about twenty-five mounds, more than three hundred feet long and over thirty feet high.

It was built by people of the Mississippian culture, the same civilization that raised the enormous mounds at Cahokia just across the river, centuries before Europeans arrived. So many of these earthworks rose here that Saint Louis earned one of its first nicknames, the Mound City. Then progress erased it. Beginning in eighteen sixty-eight, the Big Mound was carted away, its earth used as fill for a railroad along the Mississippi. By the next year, the largest of the city's ancient monuments was simply gone.