Man Mound

Along a road east of Baraboo lies the figure of a horned man, some 200 feet of it still lying in grass after more than a thousand years: a Late Woodland effigy mound built roughly between 750 and 1200 CE, and the only surviving anthropomorphic effigy mound in North America. Five human-form effigies are known, all in Wisconsin; road construction long ago took the legs, which are now painted across the road surface and marked with cutout feet in the adjoining pasture. The mound has never been excavated, and the figure may represent a ceremonial leader; scholars read the effigy-mound tradition as holding deep religious meaning for the Late Woodland peoples who built it, and the region's effigy mounds remain significant to the Ho-Chunk and other nations of the area today.

Settler surveyor William Canfield identified the figure in 1859, and by 1908 the Wisconsin Archaeological Society and Sauk County had bought and preserved it as a county park, an unusually early act of protection. It became a National Historic Landmark in 2016.

Visiting

Man Mound County Park (E13097 Man Mound Rd, Baraboo WI) is a free roadside park, open at all times, with interpretive signage; the figure is best read from the overlook, given the road cut through its lower half.

Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Man_Mound.jpg), CC0, Jeff the quiet.