East Texas town famous for controversial artifact
Workers
uncovered the Malakoff Man while digging in a pit for gravel to make
concrete for this concrete and brick home in Malakoff.
Malakoff, along with Moscow, Odessa and Sebastopol, is one of four Texas towns named after places in the former Imperial Russia. Early settlers preferred either Mitcham or Purdon, but U.S. postal authorities told them those names were already taken. They suggested naming it after a Russian fort that had recently been captured by the British during the Crimean War. That was fine with the East Texans, despite having no ties to Crimea or the 1855 Battle of Malakoff.
Lignite coal was discovered in the area in 1912, and for the next three decades as many as 800 miners worked the veins beneath the red clay soil. Meanwhile, brick-makers took advantage of the clay itself. The mines played out in the mid-1940s, but brick production remains Malakoff's major industry.
In 1904, Thomas A. Bartlett, owner of the Malakoff Pressed Brick Co., discovered a means of producing white brick, a discovery that won him a blue ribbon at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. When he decided in the late 1920s to build an elegant home for his family just outside the plant, he realized the structure would have to withstand the shock waves from dynamite used to blast out the clay. He would build the home out of his trademark pale brick and concrete reinforced with steel rebar.
On Nov. 2, 1929, quarry workers in the Trinity River bottoms about five miles west of Malakoff were mining pea gravel for the concrete to be used in the house. Their shovels clanged against something hard and substantial, and when they pushed away the gravel, they found themselves staring at a large stone head. With crudely carved ears, nose, mouth, teeth and eyes, the egg-shaped head seemed to be staring back. (Diggers found a second head in 1935 and a third in 1939.)
As the story goes, the workers left the 98-pound head on the front steps of the Bartlett house-to-be, outfitted with a hat. Was it a hoax someone had carved with modern metal tools, or was it an unbroken Humpty Dumpty sculpted by an ancient artist and cosseted for thousands of years in its pea-gravel container? If authentic, who carved it? And when?
Bartlett contacted a University of Texas archaeologist, who concluded that the head, dubbed the Malakoff Man, was the work of early Paleo-Indians and might be at least 50,000 years old. That was thousands of years before any known humans were in the area. Other experts would date the three heads as 3,000 to 4,000 years old, largely because they resemble the so-called Colossal Heads from the Veracruz area made by craftsmen of the Olmec civilization. And some suggested that at least one of the heads, the one discovered in 1939, may be a "geological peculiarity," carved by erosion or other natural forces, not by a prehistoric sculptor. The site where the heads were uncovered is now at the bottom of Cedar Creek Lake.
Authenticity debated
UT-Tyler anthropology professor Tom Guderjan insists they're frauds and that somebody used a screwdriver to carve the second and third heads. He told the Tyler Morning Telegraph a couple of years ago: "I have people bring rocks to me all the time saying, 'Does this look like a face?' and I say, 'Maybe after a bottle of wine.'"
The Malakoff Man and one of his pals reside today at the University of Texas Archeological Research Laboratory in Austin; the other is at the Navarro College Library in Corsicana. Pat Isaacson, former Malakoff mayor, now director of the Malakoff Chamber of Commerce and also president of the Malakoff Historical Society and Museum, showed me castings from the original heads that she has on display in a small glass case at the museum. She's pretty sure Malakoff Man and friends are authentic.
"I like to think they're real, and archaeologists came so close to proving it," she told me as she readied the cluttered little museum for its holiday display. "They did carbon dating and everything else, but the museum people decided that 10 years was enough time to work on it, so they pulled the archaeologists off. "
A visionary theory
My Malakoff tour guide, Lyn Dunsavage Young, knows about preserving history. She's credited with preserving the historical integrity of Dallas' Swiss Avenue neighborhood before she and her husband moved to a farm near Malakoff in 1981. Relying on an early assessment by E.H. Sellards, head of the Texas Archaeological Memorial Museum at the time Malakoff Man was discovered, she believes the heads were images carved by a people who propped them on wooden stakes beside the Trinity as a signal of their presence. Their village, she believes, overlooked plains inhabited by giant sloths, camels and mastodons; fossilized bones were found in the same excavated area. She's drawn to the notion that long before recorded history mankind was attempting to find meaning to life, to signify existence. The arc of that artistic impulse extends to the present.
"Everybody knew about the heads, growing up," Malakoff native James Surls told me by phone from his home in Carbondale, Colo. "They were absolutely believable as a child, although I can't say how believable they are as an adult. But they were a big deal."
Surls, of course, is the renowned sculptor who makes sublime art, he told Garden & Gun Magazine recently, "from green grass, trees, sticks, rivers and rocks."
Houstonians know him as a UH art professor in the 1970s and as founder of the ground-breaking Lawndale Art Center.
He and his wife, the artist Charmaine Locke, worked out of a 10,000-square-foot studio in the piney woods outside Splendora. They still own the studio, and, as Surls told me a couple of days ago, "are renegotiating our psychological intent in Splendora."
"I can't say that Malakoff Man influenced me," he said by phone, "except on a subliminal level. I had an over, above and beyond interest in anthropological stuff, and when I went off to San Diego State, I was an anthropology major, not an art major."
Authentic or not, Malakoff Man intrigues this son of a Malakoff carpenter. "Seeing a face is probably the oldest conjured image in human history," he said. "It goes back to our oldest ability to see, to be cognisant. I don't think it's a stretch to see faces in a rock."
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