Correspondent photo / Karla Dines Pat Layshock holds a pipe found near Kale Creek, south of his Newton Falls home. The pipe is made of a soft, easy-to-carve rock known as steatite. Carnegie Mellon University identified the pipe’s bear looking back at the smoker as a symbol of the Delaware Clan, a clan that traveled from Delaware, Ohio, to New Philadelphia. They were believed to have traveled through Trumbull County and surrounding areas. The bear is symbolic of Delaware’s war clan.

NEWTON FALLS — Trumbull County is named after Jonathan Trumbull, a governor of Connecticut who once owned land in the region during the mid-1700s. Early settlements were made at that time along bodies of water, the Mahoning River and its tributaries.

For nearly 30 years, Pat Layshock, 67, of Newton Falls, has been collecting early area artifacts, learning and teaching others about the earliest known settlers in the area. His interest is in people who also settled along bodies of area water and humans who settled in the area as early as 16,000 B.C.

His initial interest was in collecting arrowheads, which serve as a window into the hunting and survival techniques used by the earliest people to occupy the area. Layshock’s interest began one day in 1995 while at work at CSX railroad.

“I was working around Lodi, and the men I was working with were doing railroad construction. They kept going out in the field during lunchtime,” Layshock said.

He wondered what they were doing out there. He tagged along with one guy and asked what they were doing. They were looking for arrowheads. He soon joined the hunt.

“I brought the guy every rock I found with a point on it and finally found one. Once I found one, I was addicted. You are always on a quest for the next best find,” Layshock said. “This guy was so nice. He told me what I should look for. You have to look for sites where you would camp. There is no Motel 6. They had to find a place that would keep them dry, with resources, wood, food, and water. If you have sandy soil near a creek or river, chances are someone had a campfire there in the last 10,000 years.”

Layshock first obtains written permission from farmers to search for artifacts in their freshly plowed fields. He then excavates the high points after they plow, uncovering debitage — the remains left by the construction of stone tools and weapons.

“You get excited when you find their tools, for example, thumb scrappers they used to process their hides,” Layshock said.

Without methods to store and transport their tools, weapons and water, they camped and hunted near water systems. They either walked or traveled by canoe; they did not have horses. When they needed to travel away from the campsite, they would bury their supplies and reclaim them later, using stone axes to uncover them. If something happened to that clan and they did not return to reclaim their cache, thousands of years later, the farmer’s plow came along, spreading their material in the field.

The oldest pieces in Layshock’s collection are from the Paleo Period, found just a few miles from Newton Falls. The Meadowcroft Rockshelter, off the Ohio River, about 75 miles south of Newton Falls, is another rich source of artifacts from the same era, dating to 16,000 B.C. He also has pieces that are from people who can be traced to Clovis Point, New Mexico, dating to 10,000 B.C.

Layshock’s collection includes thousands of artifacts, mostly organized in glass cases, including arrowheads, pipes, drills, pottery and other tools and rocks used to shape and polish weapons and tools. He has published many articles in Ohio Archaeologist magazine and presents at Newton Falls High School when they study the Stone Age.

“I come in and they have some idea about what they are learning. We always assume the bow and arrow is old but it did not come into use until about 800 A.D. For 15,000 years, they used the atlatl, a device that holds a spear,” he said.

One site he excavated had been in a family since they came to the area from Connecticut. It was timbered in 2011, and Layshock excavated 2,800 square feet of the area by hand, finding 300 arrowheads, ceramics and broken pottery. Two-thirds of a bowl was reconstructed. It had been tempered with mica and fool’s gold.

“The fragments were in the mud; it looked like you had found a pot of gold. It just glowed,” he said.

Marv Gordon, a World War II POW survivor and farmer, farmed his land for over 40 years, never finding a single arrowhead. Layshock excavated an area of Gordon’s farm. Gordon was sitting by an old oak tree one day when Layshock dumped his first find of 47 arrowheads out in front of him.

“I was just riding my tractor. I was not looking for arrowheads,” Gordon said.

Layshock said, “Most of the arrowheads I have found were found within a 2-mile radius of my home, along the Mahoning River and tributaries of that and 30 years of walking.”