Towosahgy State Historic Site

Seven earthen mounds and a borrow pit, where the earth for them was dug, rise from flat farmland in Mississippi County. People first lived here in a Late Woodland village, from about A.D. 400 to 700. Around 900 the signs of Mississippian culture appear, and the place grew into a ceremonial center and a fortified town of some 250 to 300 houses inside a palisade, a wall of posts set upright in the ground, with more houses scattered outside it. Mound 5, a conical mound, was likely where the town's elite lived. For reasons no one knows, the Mississippians left around 1400. They left no written record of what they called themselves or their town. Archaeologists also know the site as Beckwith's Fort, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1969.

Missouri State Parks bought the land in 1967 and asked for a name that would honor its Native associations. The Osage and the Quapaw were the last nations known to have lived on this land, and the name chosen, Towosahgy, was meant as a close English approximation of their words for old town. It is a name given in the twentieth century, not the town's own.

Today short posts show where the palisade once stood, and panels explain what excavations have found. Missouri law makes it a felony to disturb any marked or unmarked human burial site, and state law protects every object in the park. Keep off the mounds and take nothing.