Project Scroll Research Note 2026-39: The Crumstown mastodon of 1906: the bones collected for Notre Dame, the priest who started it, and the specimen in Hay's catalogue

In July 1906 a wire item from Notre Dame reported that Prof. A. B. Reynolds had "finished collecting the bones of a mastodon," turned up by a steam dredge on a farm three miles southwest of Crumstown, St. Joseph County, Indiana, and that the skeleton was to be set up in Science Hall. The fuller syndicated version of November 1906 adds how it began. While hunting in April, Charles Custer, "a boy of sixteen," found bones and teeth on the bank of a large ditch, where the excavator "had turned them out three years before." The Rev. Alexander Buechler of Terre Coupee was "instrumental in starting, and assisting in the collection of them for the Notre Dame Museum." The Polish daily Dziennik Chicagoski printed the story on 5 July 1906, calling the boy ten and the priest "Alex. Beecher." The priest was Alexander A. Buechler, born at Ottawa, Illinois, in 1877, and pastor of St. Stanislaus Kostka at Terre Coupee from 1 May 1901. O. P. Hay's catalogue of 1923 records "considerable remains of a mastodon, found about 1902 in Olive Township," in the Notre Dame museum. The place, the date of the dredging and the institution fit the Crumstown find. Engels in 1933 still listed the mastodon as held at Notre Dame. Project Scroll Research Note 2026-39, version 1. The note sets out the record quoted, where it is held, what it changes, its limits, and what was searched before calling it new. Web version: projectscroll.com/discoveries/notes/2026-39/.