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By Tim Ruzek

In the early 1900s, Austin Furniture Company promoted itself as having “three Mammoth Stores.”

By 1920, the downtown store sported an actual mammoth tooth in its display window.

A dredger had unearthed the prehistoric tooth from the Cedar River at Austin Mill Pond on a Saturday (June 12, 1920) as part of the ongoing development of Horace Austin State Park.

The dredger’s suction pipe – part of the extensive work to turn Austin’s backwaters swampland behind the downtown dam into a beautiful state park – had worked its way down 20 feet into sand and, out of the exit pipe, came a fossil tooth weighing more than 7 pounds.

News spread across the region.

“It is a wonderfully fine specimen, almost perfect of its kind,” the Austin Daily Herald wrote June 14, 1920. “There is no question about its being a tooth of some huge monster that lived here in the glacial period and it sets one’s mind to work wondering about that head that could hold a set of such teeth and the body that could support such a head.”

This tooth weighed 7 pounds, 9 ounces and measured 6 inches from the grinding surface to its root ends, 4 inches wide and 8 inches long.

It represented the “far distant days when the earth was in the process of building and when monsters walked about the face of the earth,” wrote the Herald, which revisited the find 10 years later.

Mr. Ousley, “who is always on the job in the state park,” brought the tooth for Austin Furniture’s display window. Its whereabouts afterward are unknown.

“It harks back to the far distant days when the earth was in the process of building, and when monsters walked about the face of the earth,” the Herald wrote.

Some thought the creature was losing baby teeth, dropping them across the landscape.

“Comparing the tooth to descriptions given in the Encyclopedia Britannica, it evidently belonged to a ‘Mammoth,’ a huge animal of the Glacial period,” the Mower County Transcript-Republican wrote.

People figured the tooth belonged to the E. primigenius mammoth or “whatever that is,” the Transcript wrote. Woolly mammoths are the E. primigenius or Mammuthus primigenius and had dark-gray skin covered by reddish wool mixed with long, black bristles somewhat thicker than horsehair.

Based on similar finds around the world, the mammoth’s size at the time of losing the tooth likely was 16 feet from forehead to tail tip and 9 feet tall with 9-foot tusks and six molar teeth on each side of its jaws above and below.

Woolly are the best-known mammals of the ice ages, the Smithsonian Institute says. They became extinct due to a shifting climate, changing food sources and humans emerging as new predators.

As for why the tooth was unearthed, a dredging crew had restarted in May 1920 on Mill Pond after docking its dredger all winter on the northeast shore near the Hormel plant.

Plans called for dredging 40,000 yards of earthen material from Mill Pond, with a dredger equipped with a new discharge pipe line and electric motors replacing steam engines used in 1919. Crews also were grading and developing shoreland into parkland.

“By the time canoeing is at its best, this season followers of that sport will experience little, if any, difficulty with shallow shore lines and heavy water vegetation,” the Transcript wrote April 5, 1920.

In September 1920, dredgers found half of another mammoth tooth. The Herald wrote dramatically about the teeth of a mammoth, “whose foot fall would shake the earth.”

“Away back down the centuries, before time began, before man appeared on the earth, a great monster came into what is now the Horace Austin State Park and laid himself down and died or perhaps met his death in mortal combat with some creature more terrible than he was,” the Herald wrote Sept. 22, 1920.

Analyzing the broken tooth, the writer wondered if the tooth was broken from a “fatal, titanic contest or did an abscess form at the base of the tooth?”

Thousands of years passed after that. Native Americans then hunted the Mill Pond area followed by European settlers arriving in the 1850s. Before Austin’s development, Mill Pond was a large swamp of wild rice and waterfowl.

The Herald suggested the state install a coffer dam in Mill Pond for further fossil exploration but that didn’t happen.

Newspaper reports across Minnesota from the early 1900s mentioned other discoveries of buried mammoth fossils teeth and bones.

Austin’s John Galloway found – date unclear – a petrified tooth likely from a woolly mammoth on his farm, where Galloway Park is today. It was taken by Galloway’s son to California in 1937 but returned by one of his children in 2011 to University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum of Natural History.

In summer 1924, a dredge working in a Freeborn County swamp area of Turtle Creek found prehistoric bones in 15 feet of clay believed to be from an 11-foot-tall Columbian mammoth.

At that time, Minnesota had 12 counties with similar reports.

Tim Ruzek can be contacted at tim@mowerdistrict.org.