Sassafras Ridge (15Fu3): Mississippian town on the western border

Sassafras Ridge (site 15Fu3) is a Mississippian (opens in a new tab) mound center in Fulton County, in the far western corner of Kentucky near the Mississippi River. The National Register of Historic Places lists periods of significance reaching back to AD 0, with the Mississippian centuries of AD 1000–1499 the latest. Mississippian is the name archaeologists give a way of life, not a tribe, and the people who lived here left no name for themselves that has come down to us.

Mississippian towns were built by farming communities that grew corn and raised earthen platform mounds around open plazas. Archaeologist R. Barry Lewis studied Sassafras Ridge with its neighbors the Adams site and Wickliffe Mounds in a 1986 report for the Kentucky Heritage Council. He treated the three as a group of towns along the western Kentucky border.

The site is listed on the National Register for what it can still teach, and its exact location is restricted to protect it from looting. Our map pin is rounded to about 10 kilometers. Please do not go looking for it; the site is not open to the public.

A 2019 federal notice covered a fragment of human bone picked up from the mound’s surface in 1978. Western Kentucky University found no cultural affiliation with any present-day tribe, which is a reminder that the people of Mississippian towns cannot be matched to a single modern nation.

Kentucky today

Visitors can see a Mississippian town of the same era at Wickliffe Mounds State Historic Site (opens in a new tab) in Ballard County. Fulton County later became part of the Jackson Purchase (opens in a new tab), bought from the Chickasaw in 1818, centuries after Sassafras Ridge was abandoned.