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Last remaining ancient mound in St. Louis transferred to Osage Nation
Sugarloaf Mound, the last remaining Mississippian earthwork in St. Louis, Missouri, has been transferred to the Osage Nation. The culmination of three years of difficult negotiations, as part of the land transfer agreement the City of St. Louis will make its first public statement acknowledging Osage sovereignty and the nation’s ancestral rights to its sacred sites.
Before Europeans settled St. Louis, there were hundreds of mounds in the area built 1,000 years ago by the Mississippian civilization as ceremonial, funerary and territorial landmarks. The great Mississippian urban center of Cahokia, founded in 1050 A.D. and abruptly abandoned 300 years later, was just outside modern-day St. Louis.
Come the aggressive westward expansion of European settlers, the Osage were forcibly removed from their ancestral territories and relocated to a reservation in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. When the French immigrants built what is now St. Louis in the 19th century, they flattened Mississippian mounds by the dozens. Sugarloaf was the only one left standing, and therefore the oldest man-made structure in St. Louis. That didn’t stop people from building on it, of course, and eventually three houses went up on the mound.
In 2009, the Osage were able to acquire the northernmost tier of the mound. Seven years after that, they dismantled the house on their parcel and moved a tree. In 2023, art and civic organization Counterpublic placed billboards and public digital displays by Native American artists spotlighting the Osage Nation’s campaign to repatriate and preserve Sugarloaf Mound. The campaign was successful, and the second of the three parcels is now in Osage control.
The transfer agreement with private owner Joan Heckenberg leaves only one home remaining on the mound, currently owned by the St. Louis chapter of Kappa Psi, a national pharmaceutical fraternity. The Board Resolution and a parallel public input process organized by Counterpublic is meant to support the sale or transfer of this last home for the long-term preservation of the mound and eventual construction of an Osage Interpretive Center.
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