Michigan's Garden Beds: New Discoveries of a Lost Indigenous Agriculture

When settlers came to southwest Michigan in the 19th century, they found long-abandoned Indigenous garden beds.

I’m often asked why I don’t write more about historic Indigenous agriculture when I’m discussing the history of organic farming. One reason is that nobody today really knows much about Indigenous agriculture before European contact. That’s why a recent archaeological discovery on the border between Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is so interesting. Using lidar (light detection and ranging) technology, which can detect topography even under a forest canopy, archaeologists from Dartmouth found large, ridged agricultural fields near Anaem Omot, the site of an ancient Menominee village. When they analyzed the soil in the ridges, the researchers found evidence of amendment with ash and organic materials.

In his book Copper Trails and Iron Rails: More Voyages into Michigan’s Past, historian Larry Massie compiled as much information as he could dig up on the similar garden beds that once existed in southwest Michigan. These garden beds were first documented by French visitors in 1731 and were especially common in the Grand, St. Joseph, and Kalamazoo river valleys, but were also found as far north as Saginaw. Some were as large as three hundred acres in extent. The raised beds were five to fourteen feet in width, twelve to thirty feet long, and six to eighteen inches high, separated by paths. They were usually in parallel rows, but some were formed in geometrical designs, including at least one that had “wheel-like spokes radiating out from a raised hub.”

The early settlers had no doubt that the beds were agricultural in origin, because they were always located on the most fertile soil—often covered by lush prairie grasses or oak savannahs. Not practicing any kind of raised bed agriculture themselves, the settlers laboriously plowed up the garden beds to farm the land, which is why none exist in southwest Michigan today.

All sources agree that the garden beds had been abandoned before European contact. In 1827, one farmer cut down an oak tree growing on a garden bed and counted 325 rings, indicating that the tree had started growing in 1502. This fits well with what we know about the history of Indigenous peoples in Michigan, because that was about the time that the Anishinabek abandoned their former settlements in southern Michigan and migrated across Lake Michigan to the Green Bay area—near the newly discovered beds. By the time the Anishinabek returned in the seventeenth century, they didn’t know anything about the old garden beds.

When racist nineteenth-century anthropologists were trying to come up with an excuse to justify taking land away from Native Americans, they classed them as nomadic “hunter-gatherers” and ignored the fact that many Great Lakes tribes were also farmers. This made the garden beds—relics of what was obviously quite large-scale agriculture—difficult to explain, so they came up with stories of a “lost civilization” that was unrelated to the land’s current inhabitants. As late as the 1950s, one archaeologist went to the absurd length of speculating that “the beds were a hunting aid over which bison stumbled,” despite the fact that there weren’t bison in Michigan.

Fortunately, the Dartmouth archaeologists are being much more culturally sensitive than their predecessors and are working with the Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin to help interpret this site, which they agree was built by their ancestors and not some “lost civilization.” Despite the destruction of so much evidence, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the Anishinabek in ancient Michigan farmed most of the same areas that are in agriculture today.