Rockwell Park in Havana was established as a city park in 1849 and has long served as a community gathering place, with its large hill used for public speaking, including a speech by Stephen A. Douglas on August 13, 1858, just before the Lincoln-Douglas U.S. Senate campaign debates; Abraham Lincoln arrived at the Havana riverfront by steamboat during Douglas' speech and spoke at the park the following day. Its deeper significance was not confirmed until 1986, when the hill covering most of the park was identified as a Native American mound constructed around 2,000 years ago. Built by people of the Hopewell Culture, part of a major cultural florescence at riverine locations across the North American mid-continent, the mound reflects an ordered society rich in symbolism and ceremony that buried honored dead in mounds, practiced elaborate funerary rites, and took part in long-distance trade involving obsidian, grizzly bear teeth, copper, lead, and marine shell. Rockwell Park Mound is the second largest Native American mound in Illinois and the largest recorded for the 2,000-year-old Middle Woodland cultural period of Illinois prehistoric people. Its construction was a tremendous undertaking, requiring an estimated 1,760,000 baskets of earth to create a two-acre mound fourteen feet high. Archaeologists have identified Havana Hopewell Rockwell Mound as lying at the center of the Havana-Hopewell Culture, and some have suggested that Rockwell Mound, its surrounding village area, and other nearby mound and village sites in and on the edge of Havana may be the birthplace of Middle Woodland culture. It is one of the few surviving mounds in the Havana area, as most others were destroyed by construction, road building, cultivation, or burial under the city. Hopewell people used stone-tipped spears, hunted elk, deer, waterfowl, and turkey, ate fish from the river and backwater lakes, cultivated plants including goosefoot, maygrass, knotweed, barley, marsh elder, and sunflower, and practiced stone carving, pottery making, and weaving.