Burnett's Mound

If you go through Topeka Kansas on the I-470 southern bypass, you will pass by this distinct hill. It's called Burnett's Mound, I recently learned.

A tornado hit Topeka on June 8, 1966. It was rated as an F5 and said to be the 5th most costliest tornado in U.S. history.

I would have been 3½ at the time. My father liked to go back to K-State, his alma mater, in Manhattan Kansas, so we were always driving down this stretch of road. His mother was a housemother at the Tri-Delt house at K-State, and we went back for football games and the spring Open House. We had just been down this stretch in April or May when Open House was scheduled, so we saw the route just before the tornado. I don't remember when we went down the road after the tornado, but it could have been in October, when football started back. I still remember what the hill looked like, it was decimated. This is one of my earliest memories, and some of the worst destruction you will ever see from a tornado. Each year, I remembered the spot where the tornado had struck, long after they rebuilt apartments on the hill.

I looked into the site and visited it, and found an interesting story. The hill was called Burnett's Mound by the white men, but the Indians had a legend about the mound. They said that the mound protected the area from tornados. Ironically, the tornado entered Topeka by coming in right across the mound. Maybe the old Indian Medicine Man foresaw the event, but just had it backwards. Or maybe they were suckering the White Man into a kill box.

The site used to have a big cross on the top. I looked on a map and saw that there was a road called Skyline Drive that went right up to it. The article said that the cross was moved to a nearby cemetery when people going up the hill to party repeatedly vandalized it. I wanted to go see for myself, so I drove up there on the way home from a trip.

Skyline Drive was paved at one time, you can still see sections of craked asphalt in some places. Now it is all gravel with huge limestone boulders ringing its perimeter, probably to prevent cars from dropping off the sides. When you get about 3/4 the way out to the point, there is a big metal swing gate across the road. The road continues up to a large circular parking lot, which you can tell used to be the destination for people to come up, it still has a ring of protective boulders around it. The day I visited, there was a large spent fireworks pack in the middle of the old parking lot, so you can tell that someone celebrated the 4th up there in style. I'll bet the fireworks from the top were visible a long way off.

At the end of the lot is a stairway, an old stone one flanked by a crumbling concrete one with a bent hand rail. Graffiti is on every surface. The little stair leads up to a distinct mount on the point of the ridge, very small compared to the entire hill, but a perfect little dome at the end of the ridge. I found a surveyors bench mark by the remnant of the trail, but nothing else to mark the significance of the site. Wildflowers and a stunted little tree were all that remained. I was expecting a monument or a historical plaque, but the vandals surely destroyed that long ago.

The view from the mound is fantastic. I've always thought of Topeka as an uninteresting looking town, but from the mound, the downtown skyline with the capitol is actually very pretty. There is a huge water tank (the reservoir kind, not the tower kind) on the front side of the mound, it's visible from the highway. There is a road leading back to it and a tall chain link fence with barbed wire on top surrounding it. The trees have littered down debris on top of the tank, and it looks like something that nature is trying to reclaim, despite the highway-sign yellow it's painted in.

The place has a eerie feel, even without knowing the tornadic history. I kept wondering if it was an Indian mound in the classical sense, a place where they buried and honored their dead. Even with all the neglect and vandalism, I guess it still is.