Ohio’s statehood wasn’t the only thing being commemorated in Chillicothe last month. A spectacular concentration of ancient earthworks was also celebrating the centennial of its being proclaimed a national monument by President Warren Harding in 1923.
Hopewell Culture National Historical Park preserves six of the magnificent ancient monuments in the Chillicothe area: Mound City Group, Hopeton Earthworks, High Bank Works, Hopewell Mound Group, Spruce Hill Works, and Seip Earthworks.
Mound City Group, three miles north of Chillicothe on State Route 104, was designed and built by Native Americans over many centuries between A.D. 1-400, making it one of the earliest constructed Hopewell earthworks. The only fully restored Hopewell earthwork complex, Mound City Group was likely a social and ceremonial gathering place for these native peoples.
In 1846, a pair of amateur archaeologists from Chillicothe — newspaper editor Ephraim Squier and physician Edwin Davis — mapped the mounds on the then-forest-covered site and documented what they found inside them. They called it “Mound City” to describe its unique concentration of at least two dozen burial mounds, encircled by a low earthen wall in one enclosed area larger than 10 football fields, ringed by eight borrow pits from which earth was likely taken to construct the mounds.
Archeological practice of the day was to name a newly described culture for the place where it is first discovered. Therefore, this remarkable Native American culture was named for Mordecai Hopewell, the Chillicothe farmer who owned the field containing these mounds.
Squier and Davis described the results of their surveys and explorations in a book they called Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. The following year, it became the first publication of the Smithsonian Institution.
In 1891-2, Warren Moorehead partially excavated some of the mounds, finding artifacts made from obsidian, silver, shark teeth and other exotic materials the native people obtained from their extensive trade network. Many of the most famous images of the Hopewell culture are from the objects found at this site. Mica was used to create a bird claw and a hand with elongated fingers stretching upward; a bear claw was fashioned from copper. A selection of items was displayed not only during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, but also in the newly created Field Museum.
As at the other Hopewell earthworks sites, decades of plowing done by farmers gradually lowered and widened the mounds. When the area was included as part of Camp Sherman during World War I, military engineers flattened it to make way for the buildings that were hurriedly constructed to house the troops being trained to fight. Half of the mounds were completely destroyed; the rest were severely degraded.
Fortunately, the level of the ceremonial building floors beneath the mounds was below the level of the ground, so when Camp Sherman was dismantled after the war, archaeologists were able to study the burials below the mounds. The organization now known as the Ohio History Connection funded the reconstruction of Mound City Group in the 1920s, basing its efforts on the maps Squier and Davis made. Staff archaeologists Henry Shetrone and William Mills excavated all but one of the mounds so visitors could appreciate the underlying structure of the ceremonial building.
In 1992, four more of Chillicothe’s Hopewell earthwork sites were added to Mound City Group and the name of the park was changed to Hopewell Culture National Historical Park.
The site is part of the nine different Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks sites that are being considered for addition to the UNESCO World Heritage list. Nowhere else are there so many of these unique ceremonial complexes so close together, leading many to believe that Ross County may have been the most important cultural center in eastern North America 2,000 years ago. As Squier and Davis wrote in Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, “this section of the Scioto river and Paint creek valleys, of which the city of Chillicothe is the centre, possesses a deserved celebrity for its beauty, unexampled fertility, and the great number, size, and variety of its ancient remains.”
beesfirstappearance 
Thank you, Bee, for helping us in a way you could not have anticipated. We hope in the next month or two, to have a visit from a French pianist and her husband. When we asked her what she might like to see after she finishes doing some benefit concerts, the couple both chose sites in Ohio; especially Native American/Indian/First Peoples sites. You’ve just unlocked many new possibilities of places that they would find very pleasing to visit.