BONEYARD CREEK

There are several stories about the origin of the name "Boneyard". One is that the local Indians hung their dead over the stream, allowing the bones to fall into the creek, so that the creek was full of human bones when the first American settlers arrived. This could be an example of excarnation, which many Native American peoples indeed practiced. One problem with this story is that there have been no confirmed findings of human bones in excavations along the streams.


The Boneyard Creek is one of six watersheds within the City of Champaign, Illinois. The Boneyard Creek watershed includes the oldest parts of the City, including the downtown area and "Campustown", a business area adjacent to the University of Illinois campus.
In pre-settlement times, the Boneyard, like most of the other watercourses of Champaign County, Illinois, was probably a series of connected wetlands without a clearly defined channel. With settlement, the drainage was "improved". Today the Boneyard is a highly channelized stream, running in a slit trench, with steel sheet pilings along much of its length.

P.S. The brown you see is actually grass. That's how our grass looks these days with the drough we have had all summer. Will take another blip perhaps again in the fall.