Landmarks: Local lore in south suburban Palos Park points to mysterious fortifications that predate a nearby ghost town. And now two friends are on the case. - Chicago Tribune

2021-12-30 08:03:34 By : Mr. Edgar Zhou

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In the larger scope of things, the vista that greets visitors to the parking lot at St. Luke Orthodox Church in Palos Park isn’t grand. It is sweeping, and for Illinoisan flatlanders that’s something. But an anomaly just under the soil may cement its legacy in the annals of Chicago-area history.

Atop a low bluff bordering a valley cut thousands of years ago by glacial meltwaters, a shallow slope meanders eventually to the Cal-Sag Channel, a modern waterway dug through ancient swamps and sloughs.

A scenic overlook now, it’s offered a nice vantage point for centuries to anyone who might be in the area. And over the years, there have been quite a few.

Among them is Bob Busch, whose father’s farm was next door and who spent countless days growing up in the 1950s exploring the slope behind the church.

“That was Church Hill, and it was the best sledding hill in Cook County,” Busch said.

A notable Church Hill feature was a break in the terrain, a depression that made “many a flying saucer or toboggan or kid go flying because they hit this little ditch,” Busch said. “My brother almost broke his butt on it.”

These days, Busch asserts that ditch isn’t a natural feature, but rather remnants of an earthwork structure engineered by long forgotten people.

The property is not far from a ghost town, the village of South Mount Forest, which in the 1890s boasted a post office, general store, blacksmith and was the home to the Palos Township office, then the only local government body. Most of the village was sold to the nascent Forest Preserves of Cook County in the 1910s.

Busch, whose family roots in the Palos Park area stretch back decades before South Mount Forest’s peak, knows his ties to the land are a tiny fraction of others who called it home.

“They’ve been finding artifacts in Palos since the 1830s,” he said. “They’re all over the place.”

A dozen or so arrowheads and spear points are in the collections at the Palos Historical Society, where he’s been president the last five years. More have been sent over the years to facilities such as the Illinois State Museum. And they continue to turn up.

He was contacted over the summer by Palos Park homeowners who found something unusual while planting a tree in their front yard. It turned out to be a spear point, likely thousands of years old, according to archaeologist Dan Melone, who came in to consult.

Melone dug another hole nearby and uncovered another stone tool.

“Dan got excited,” said Busch. “It was real, honest to God joy. Turns out it was thousands of years old. It was pretty beat up, but it was prehistoric.”

Busch called Melone about the homeowner’s artifact because they’re buddies, and together they’ve been trying to figure out what could possibly be on the south slope of Church Hill.

After all, it’s not necessarily a secret.

“In 1837, a fellow wrote a narrative about an earthwork in Palos,” Busch said. “In 1884, an archaeological special note was put in a history of Cook County talking about this earthwork.”

Another account of an earthwork in Palos Township appeared in a 1912 news story.

“They were 100% ignored,” he said.

But local and family lore indicated there was something to those reports, and Busch never stopped looking for the earthworks, which legend indicated had been on family land sold in the 1950s to the Forest Preserves of Cook County.

“I got my aunt, when she was still alive, to draw a diagram of where buildings were on the farm,” he said. “I talked to cousins, and everybody else. No dice.

“Then one day in 1998 I was looking at an aerial picture, and there it was, right below the church,” he said. “It was clear as a bell if you know what to look for. It’s no longer a question of if it’s here, but why it’s here, who put it here and when did they put it here?”

The triangular nature of the earthworks indicated it was of European origin, rather than Native American. But otherwise, it’s an enigma.

“My family has been living out here since 1860, and they have no idea who built it,” Busch said. “It was on my grandmother’s farm, and she was born in 1871. People would come out and look at it, there’ve been stories written about it, but nobody ever said who built it and why. It’s a real mystery.”

Speculation over the years has tied the site to the legend of a Fort Checagau established and occupied by the French in the 1600s in what would become Chicago. But many historians dispute the existence of that fort, saying it more likely was located in what’s now St. Joseph, Michigan.

Busch said the legend began with a letter from the French explorer Henri de Tonti.

“But it doesn’t say where it is,” he said. “It’s been put everywhere from the Skokie Lagoons to New Lenox. Nobody knows where it is.”

Busch teamed up with Melone in 2008 in an effort to find out more. Melone, the archaeologist, procured an old ground penetrating radar outfit and they got to work trying to find out more.

“We found an anomaly,” Melone said. “But we didn’t excavate because we didn’t have permits.”

The evidence made him a believer. Besides the abnormal radar scan, workers installing cell towers behind the church around that time dug up what Melone believes is a cannon ball. Then there’s the local lore.

“There’s too much evidence, too many things found,” he said. “They’re not trying to invent a story about mounds with giants in them, or alien footprints. All the farmers and townsfolk are saying they found what they believe to be fortifications.

“(Busch’s) great-grandfather and grandfather didn’t plow or plant that area — they knew something was there. It wasn’t just local lore. They saw things.”

Without being able to excavate, Melone’s best guess is rather than a fort, the earthworks point to an outpost frequented by fur traders.

“You have the fur trade, you have the rivers — the connections to what would become Chicago, so it’s a very strategic point to put a safety structure,” he said. “It was a place to sort of hang out for a little while, to cool your jets, where you don’t have to worry about anyone harassing you.

“I believe it was a French fur trade thing. I can’t prove it was French, but I like to believe it.”

It would be an ideal place for something like that, Busch said. It was situated on high ground between the Sag Valley and the Des Plaines River, near one of the area’s main early trails, now known as Kean Avenue — “the only place you could cross the Sag between Lemont and Blue Island.”

“Who would want to build an earthwork that protects not only a water route but a land route? Sounds like some enlightened people,” he said.

Beyond the involvement of Melone, Busch is surprised he hasn’t been able to attract more scientific attention to the site. He chalks it up to Palos Park’s rural nature — the adjacent church had working outhouse facilities until 1969 or so, he said — and big city snobbery.

“If they found this (downtown) at State and Wacker, there’d be a state park there,” he said.

Now approaching 75 years old and a veteran of open heart surgery, Busch is not giving up his quest to solve the mystery, but he’s glad the younger Melone is involved as well.

“Dan’s on it,” he said. “I’m trying to teach him everything I know so he can carry it on when I finally croak. I want the word out there.

“It’s not about me, and it’s not really about Dan. It’s about the truth.”

In Melone, he has a willing listener.

“Bob truly is the expert,” Melone said. “I wish I could download his brain.

“We have the hypothesis, but we need to prove it. I’m not going to tell you definitively it was French or for fur trading. It could even be Native American mounds. We don’t know.

“We hope one day we can get the truth to come to light.”

Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at peisenberg@tribpub.com.