A funeral home opened at least 10,000 years too late for the tragic demise of one of Summit County’s earliest inhabitants.
Construction workers excavating the site of the Billow Fairlawn Chapel off Miller Road in September 1966 were surprised to discover skeletal remains buried nearly 12 feet beneath the surface.
Phil Narzisi, vice president of Narzisi Construction Co., was digging an irrigation ditch when he unearthed a large object that he initially thought was a piece of pipe.
Akron resident Charles W. Billow, 83, chairman of Billow Funeral Home, recalls the construction worker’s strange discovery at the vacant lot behind the new Village Theater north of West Market Street.
‘‘They were excavating for the foundation for our garage to the funeral home,’’ he said. ‘‘When they found it, the whole thing was just a hole in the ground.’’
Narzisi showed Billow the mud-caked object and asked ‘‘What do you think this is?’’
‘‘Boy, I don’t know,’’ Billow replied.
Whatever it was, it had been there a long time.
Bulldozer operator Joe Marziale, foreman for Schmeltzer Construction, explored the site further and dug up a 40-pound hip bone, 3-foot rib and brick-size vertebrae.
He called the University of Akron, and within hours, the site was teeming with geology professors, college students and curious onlookers.
Lo and behold, the Fairlawn mastodon!
Mastodons were elephantlike mammals that roamed North America during the Pleistocene Epoch before becoming extinct roughly 10,000 years ago. They were stockier and shorter than modern elephants, and displayed long, curved tusks and shaggy brown coats.
The Fairlawn mastodon, which died about 8,000 B.C., stood about 8 feet tall, weighed 7,000 pounds and was still a juvenile — as evidenced by its bones, which had not fused.
Retired professor Jim Teeter, 74, who taught geology at the University of Akron from 1965 to 1995, recalls going to the Billow excavation site with colleague Paul Wingard and using iron stakes to probe the thick, black muck.
‘‘Oh, you don’t know what mud’s like,’’ Teeter said with a laugh. ‘‘It was terrible. … I remember that it was very cold, miserable weather. It was in the fall in late September, and I think we worked on that well into November.’’
Unfortunately, the excavators’ heavy machinery had crushed the creature’s head, so there were just bits and pieces of skull and tusk, Teeter said.
‘‘They had removed inadvertently a number of larger bones,’’ he said. ‘‘They were just in piles of sediment that had been excavated. So we had to go through that stuff.’’
The toe bone was connected to the foot bone. And the foot bone was connected to the leg bone.
Teeter’s main interest had always been in microfossils, so this was quite a different experience for him. He said the funeral home was kind to delay construction for two months while the UA team tried to find the rest of the skeleton.
Billow, who watched the professors and students shovel mud, said the company had planned to build its chapel on Ghent Road but was forced to switch to Miller Road because of Summit Mall’s development.
The mastodon find caught the Billow family by surprise.
‘‘After checking some records out there in Fairlawn, we found that where we built our building was the lowest point in the city of Fairlawn,’’ Billow said. ‘‘It was all swamp in there.
‘‘That’s the reason Croghan Park is next door to us. Acme owned the land and they were going to put an Acme in there. They found out that the ground was so poor that it wouldn’t support a building.’’
Teeter said the site was a ‘‘kettle lake’’ that formed eons ago when a retreating glacier left behind a giant chunk of ice that melted and deposited fine-grain sediment.
‘‘This poor creature wandered out and got stuck in the mud, and that was the end of him — or her,’’ he said.
In the first month, volunteers found more than 100 bones, including 40 major ones. The skeleton, which was about 60 percent complete, served as an inspiration.
One day, Teeter’s wife, Gladys, found their 3-year-old daughter Kathy digging with a spoon in their Stow front lawn.
‘‘What are you doing?’’ the mother wondered.
‘‘I’m going to find a mastodon,’’ Kathy replied.
The National Science Foundation approved a $28,000 grant (about $194,000 today) to complete the UA dig. More than half of the money went toward providing a foundation and pilings for the Billow Co. garage and installing pumps to drain the swampy water.
‘‘We put in 6 feet of gravel and then a 3-foot-thick concrete pad that we built the building on,’’ Billow recalled.
The Fairlawn chapel opened in December 1967.
UA cleaned and preserved the prehistoric bones for the benefit of future generations.
Professor Lisa Park, 45, who is working at the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C., during a two-year leave of absence from UA’s department of geology and environmental sciences, said the mastodon skeleton is still being used to educate students about ‘‘Pleistocene megafauna.’’
‘‘We loan it out to people doing classroom presentations for K-12 outreach,’’ she said. ‘‘We use it in our paleontology class at the University of Akron. It’s part of a lab where the students learn different vertebrate bones.’’
Some of the bones are on display in a case at Crouse Hall.
‘‘Probably one of the big controversies of mammoths and mastodons was whether or not they went extinct or if they were overhunted by
Paleo-Indians,’’ she said. ‘‘That’s still kind of debated in science circles. How did these things go extinct?’’
Scientists are interested in lost creatures because they provide an example of how today’s organisms might respond to climate change, she said. Experts also wonder whether mastodons and mammoths could someday be reborn through the harvesting of ‘‘paleogenetic material.’’
‘‘Kind of like Jurassic Park,’’ she said.
For now, at least, the Fairlawn mastodon won’t be wandering off.
‘‘It’s been an important part of our department and the education that happens in that building,’’ Park said.
Digging in the mud for two months, Teeter certainly found it to be educational.
‘‘It’s kind of ironic, isn’t it?’’ he said. ‘‘You think of funeral homes burying things instead of digging them up.’’
Mark J. Price is a Beacon Journal copy editor. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or send email to mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.