Warren K. Moorehead

Warren King Moorehead was known in his time as the 'Dean of American archaeology'; born in Siena, Italy to missionary parents on March 10, 1866, he died on January 5, 1939 at the age of 72, and is buried in his hometown of Xenia, Ohio.

His mother died when he was quite young, and while his father remarried and became head of a Presbyterian seminary in Xenia, Ohio, his travels for keeping that institution open left young Warren and his sister in the care of two aunts, who are recalled vividly in Helen Hooven Santmyer's non-fictional "Ohio Town" and the novel "And Ladies of the Club."

Their brother, Moorehead's grandfather, was Joseph Warren King, whose wealth from the King's Powder Mills fortune rooted in the American Civil War became both an opportunity and a curse for the fledgeling archaeologist. Digging about in the earth and soil was considered beneath a refined family, and for much of his life Warren King Moorehead was pressured to enter the family business. Parts of the 19th century infrastructure remain in the Little Miami River Valley near Kings Mills, Ohio, a near- ghost town next to the Peters Cartridge Company once the King's Powder Mills, desolate except for the now more famous neighbor named after it, "Kings Island," the Cincinnati area amusement park.

Moorehead went to Denison University, near Moorehead family interests in Muskingum County (from which is descended his collateral relation, actress Agnes Moorehead). By 1887 Moorehead had left without a degree, and his relationship with academic archaeology stayed distant and at odds throughout his life, adding to the speedy dismissal of Moorehead's work after his death by most of professional archaeology.

Excavations and collections begun as a schoolboy continued through self-financed work taking him to a display of his own at the 1888 Cincinnati Centennial Exposition, and contact with Dr. Thomas Wilson of the Smithsonian Institution. Dr. Wilson encouraged and possibly helped Moorehead to enter the University of Pennsylvania for study under the famous Dr. Edward Drinker Cope, but opportunities to lecture and write for publication led Warren away from class work. His publication of the novel "Wanneta, The Sioux," in 1890 led to a lecture tour and opportunities to write for a larger audience than just his professors.

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