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Prehistoric Giants in Noblesville
By: David Heighway, Hamilton County Historian
Studying history sometimes takes you farther back that you expect, as seen in an article in the April 25, 1884, issue of the Noblesville Independent. It describes what happened when an 11-year-old boy named William Heiny did some exploring along the bank of the White River where it flows through Noblesville. While digging in the river bank “a few rods below the wagon bridge, on the left bank” – about 50 feet south of Logan Street, behind the present Judicial Center – he found two enormous bones. After he showed these around town to try and figure out what animal they were, other people went back and continued to dig. They found around 50 large bones including femur bones, a scapula (shoulder) bone, ribs, vertebrae, etc., but no skull. The scapula was 20 inches long and 9 inches at the widest part. They took the bones to some local doctors who, after talking with other local residents, guessed that the animal was definitely prehistoric and probably something like a megatherium or giant ground sloth. Children would recognize this animal as the character of “Sid” in the movie Ice Age. There was no discussion of what eventually happened to the bones. In later years, finds of the remains of mammoths and mastodons would end up being sent to the state. Occasionally, the people who found these remains would think that the bones were from dinosaurs. However, there are no dinosaur fossils to be found in Hamilton County or in Indiana. The level of ground in which those would appear were scraped away by the glaciers during the Ice Age.