Diagrams of ancient garden beds found in Kalamazoo during archeological excavation of mounds. - Michigan's mysterious Indian mounds by Vivian M. Baulch, Detroit News

Garden-Beds in History of Kalamazoo County, Michigan, with illustrations and biographical sketches of its prominent men and pioneers. By Samuel W. Durant. Philadelphia, Everets, 1880 - from the MSU Maps Website

"These curious evidences of prehistoric occupation do not appear to have been plentifully found outside Michigan.  They are mentioned in notices of antiquities of Wisconsin and we believe, have been found sparingly in Indiana.  They abounded in the valleys of the Grand, St. Joseph, and Kalamazoo Rivers, and covered sometimes hundreds of acres.  They have been quite appropriately named "garden beds," from a real or fancied resemblance to the garden beds of the present day.  They are of various forms, - rectangular, triangular, circular, elliptical, and complex, - and evince, in many instances, a remarkable degree of mechanical skill, as well as cultivated as cultivated taste.  A large number of those observed in Kalamazoo County are laid out in regular parallelograms, precisely as a gardener of modern days arranges his beds for onions and beets.  The questions naturally arise, Were they actually garden beds for the cultivation of vegetables?  Could they have been extensive plats where flowers were raised for the supply of some great city on Lake Michigan or in the Ohio Valley?  Were they botanical gardens" The accompanying diagrams illustrate some of the varieties which were found in various parts of Kalamazoo County.  They have all, or nearly all, disappeared under the white man's cultivation.

Henry R. Schoolcraft was probably the first writer to give accounts and descriptions of these peculiar relics of an earlier race in Michigan.  They were mentioned in a French work as early as 1748.

Schoolcraft gave drawings and careful descriptions of them in 1827 and speaks of them as "forming by far the most striking characteristic antiquarian monuments of this district of the country." 

In 1839, John T. Blois, a citizen of this State, published in the "Gazetteer of Michigan" detailed descriptions, with descriptions, of one variety of the beds. 

Bela Hubbard, Esq., of Detroit, divides the beds into eight, which he describes as follows: 

"1. Wide convex beds, in parallel rows, without paths, composing independent plats. Width of beds, twelve feet; paths, none; length,  seventy-four to one hundred and fifteen feet.

“2. Wide convex beds, in parallel rows, separated by paths of same width, in independent plats.  Width of bed, twelve to sixteen feet; paths, the same; length seventy-four to one hundred and thirty-two feet.

“3.  Wide parallel beds, separated by narrow paths, arranged in a series of plats longitudinal to each other.  Width of beds, fourteen feet; paths two feet; length, one hundred feet.

“4.  Long, narrow beds, separated by narrower paths, and arranged in a series of longitudinal plats, each plat divided from the next by semicircular heads.  Width of beds, five feet;  paths, one foot and a half;  length one hundred feet; height eighteen inches.

 “5. Parallel beds, arranged in plats similar to Class 4, but divided by circular heads.  Width of beds, six feet; paths, four feet; length, twelve to forty feet; height, eighteen inches.

“6. Parallel bed, of varying widths and lengths, separated by narrow paths, and arranged in plats of two or more, at right angles ( north, south, east, and west ); to the plats adjacent.  Width of beds,  five to fourteen feet; paths, one to two feet; length, twelve to thirty feet; height, eight inches.

“7. Parallel beds, of uniform width and length, with narrow paths, arranged in plats or blocks, and single beds, at varying angles.  Width of  beds, six feet; paths two feet; length, about thirty feet;  height ten to twelve inches.

“8.  Wheel shaped plats, consisting of a circular bed, with beds of  uniform shape and size, radiating therefrom, all separated by narrow paths. Width of beds, six to twenty feet: paths, one foot; length, fourteen to twenty feet.” 

The area covered by these cultivated plats varied, in different localities, from five to as many as three hundred acres. *  These remarkable “gardens”  were found by the first settlers about Schoolcraft, on Prairie Ronde, on Toland’s Prairie, near Galesburg; on the burr oak plains of Kalamazoo village, and elsewhere.

Henry Little, Esq., states that they covered as many as ten acres lying to the south of the Kalamazoo mound.  

Among these last were specimens of wheel form.   They were overgrown with burr oak trees,  of the same size as those scattered over the surrounding plain. 

“On the farm of J. T. Cobb, section 7, town of Schoolcraft, the beds were quite numerous as late as 1860.   There must have been fifteen acres of them on his land.  The ‘sets’  would average five or six beds each.  Neighbors put the number of acres covered with them in 1830, within the space of a mile, at one hundred.” + 

Hon. E. Lakin Brown corroborates these statememts.

The circular one in the diagram is from information furnished by Henry Little and A. T. Prouty of Kalamazoo.  The triangular pointed one is from a drawing by H. M. Shafter, of Galesburg.  Roswell Ransom, James R. Cumings, and A, D. P. Van Buren have also contributed interesting information upon this subject.  The diagrams are copied from the American Antiquarian for April, 1878, in an article contributed by Bela Hubbard, Esq. 

Mr. Van Buren furnishes some account of  the “beds”  first found on section 13, Comstock township,  on lands purchased by C. C. White for William Toland, the first settler in the township.  The beds in this locality covered some five acres, and were of the same general description as those before spoken of, and included parallelograms, circles, and triangles.  Mr. Van Buren says J. R. Cumings remembers plowing some of these gardens, and says that the beds were so high above the intervening paths that the plow in crossing the latter ran out of the ground.  He estimates the height from bottom of paths to top of bed, or ridge, at eighteen inches.  

The antiquity of these “garden beds” is a question about which there are different opinions.  They were found in several instances covering the ancient mounds, an from this circumstance some writers have arrived at the conclusion that they were the work of a people who occupied the country long after the  “Mound Builders”  had disappeared.  This hypothesis may be the correct one, but is not necessarily so.  There are people living today who have seen the burial places of white men, if not cultivated at least abandoned and turned into pasture lands for sheep and cattle.  The burial ground of the Strang Mormons at  Voree. ++  Walworth Co., Wis., was occupied,  in 1873, as a barnyard.  Even if the mounds were the sacred burial places of those who erected them, its quite possible that within a few generations they may have have been occupied for purposes of agriculture, in common with the surrounding fields.  But it is quite within the bounds of probability that the people who cultivated the “garden beds”  may have known as little of the builders of the mounds as the red Indians who succeeded them. 

• Statement of Schoolcraft and Blois
• + Hubbard.  The first diagram represent this class.  It was furnished by Messrs. Prouty and Cobb.
• ++ A Mormon colony planted by James J. Strang after the death of  Joseph Smith at Nauvoo. Illinois, about 1845.

Both classes of antiquities date far beyond the knowledge of the savages, and were evidently the works of a civilized race. 

In examine human skulls taken from mounds near Spring Lake, Ottawa County, Michigan, Professor  W. D. Gunning advanced the opinion, from the forms of the skulls, the accompanying relics ( copper hatchets, needles, broken pottery, etc. ). And from other evidence, that these remains date back two thousand years or more. 

Mr. Bela Hubbard advances the opinion, in reference to the “garden beds,” that they may have been cultivated until within three or four centuries of the present time, as that period would have sufficed  for the growth of  the largest forest trees found upon them.  It is altogether probable that the mounds were first constructed, and their age is not overestimated by Professor  Gunning.  Nothing resembling the garden beds has ever been found, or  certainly ever described, in the region where the mound building architecture reached its culmination,  though the same system may have been in vogue at a much earlier day.  The Michigan people may have belonged to a later period,  or they may have been a colony from the central region of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers."