Copperhead Hill: Four Thousand Years on One Ozark Farm

By Rob Maupin

High in a limestone bluff above a spring-fed Ozark creek, two dark openings sit side by side in the pale rock. Seen from the right angle, they look like the empty eye sockets of a skull. The cavers who mapped them in 1972 called the place Turnback Cave Number Two. The State of Missouri calls it Skull Cave, archaeological site 23LA1310. The neighbors have always called this ground Copperhead Hill - and they earned the name honestly.

Rob Maupin has walked this twenty-one-acre farm in Lawrence County, Missouri for more than half a century. His father, a high school history teacher, dreamed his whole life of learning what lay beneath the cave floor - and never once put a shovel in it. That restraint preserved everything.

In 2011, Maupin did what his father chose not to do, but did it the right way: he invited the Center for Archaeological Research at Missouri State University to excavate. What they found is the heart of this book. People had returned to this small dry shelter again and again across roughly four thousand years - Late Archaic hunters, Caddoan Mississippian families, the later Neosho people - knapping stone by its light, cooking at its hearths, and leaving behind, among far humbler things, a single drilled animal tooth that someone once wore.

But a scientific report is not a book. It cannot tell you what it feels like to walk a food plot after spring plowing and find a spearpoint no human hand has touched in three thousand years. It cannot tell you about the copperhead that poured out of a winter boot on the shop floor, or the blocked west tunnel that a bus driver swore ran for miles - and swallowed his own son for four days, his pony left tied by the creek. It cannot tell you about Mrs. Buffington on her porch swing, the last person alive who remembered the Whinrey mill as a working thing, describing women in gingham dresses seining catfish from the drained millpond.

Copperhead Hill braids all of it together: rigorous archaeology, pioneer-era history, Ozark folklore, and a lifetime of firsthand stewardship. Fully illustrated with a detailed property map, chapter artwork, and a prologue set five hundred years ago on the eve of winter, it follows one small piece of ground from the first families who sheltered in its cave to the three generations of one family who kept it whole.

It is a book about a cave, a creek, and a hill. It is really a book about what we owe the places we are handed, and what we choose to pass on.

Perfect for readers of Ozark and Missouri history, American archaeology, rural memoir, and anyone who has ever picked up a stone in a field and wondered who held it last.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HDY9DJJ7
• ISBN13: 9798192215173
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 105 Pages
• Weight: 0.31 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.3" x 6.0"