Mound City Group

At a glance

Overview

Mound City Group is a nearly square earthen enclosure of about 17 acres on the west bank of the Scioto River, about three miles north of downtown Chillicothe, holding two dozen burial mounds built by people of the Hopewell culture between roughly AD 1 and 400. Each mound was raised over a timber ceremonial building where the dead were cremated and laid with objects made of copper, mica, obsidian and pipestone brought from across the continent. Squier and Davis excavated every mound in 1846 and made the site famous; in 1917 the Army built Camp Sherman, a World War I training cantonment of about 2,000 buildings, on top of it and wrecked much of what farming had left. After the camp was razed, the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society excavated in 1920-21 and rebuilt the mounds from the 1848 map, and President Warren G. Harding proclaimed Mound City Group National Monument on March 2, 1923. Congress renamed and enlarged it as Hopewell Culture National Historical Park on May 27, 1992, and in 2023 it became part of the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks World Heritage Site.

The name

Squier and Davis wrote in 1848 that the enclosure was called 'Mound City' because of the great number of mounds inside its walls. (source)

Native American history

The mounds were built by people of the Hopewell culture, who lived in small, scattered hamlets in the south-central Ohio valleys and gathered at sites like this for funerals, feasts and rites of passage. The National Park Service dates use of Mound City to roughly AD 1 to 400 (one NPS page says AD 100 to 400). Under each mound stood a building where about one hundred people in all were cremated and laid on the floor with offerings; the materials came from far away, including Knife River flint from North Dakota, obsidian from the Yellowstone area, copper from Lake Superior, mica from the southern Appalachians and galena from the Mississippi valley. After about AD 400 the valley was not emptied: descendants stayed, later 'intrusive mound' people buried their own dead in the old mounds, and by about AD 1000 Fort Ancient farmers lived in the valley until about 1650. In the 1700s the Shawnee held the Scioto valley; two of their five divisions lived there, and the Chillicothe division's town stood at present-day Frankfort. The 1795 Treaty of Greenville extinguished Native claims to the Scioto valley.

• Mound City Group enclosure and mounds: mound, west bank of the Scioto River, State Route 104, Union Township, Ross County, Middle Woodland (Hopewell), c. AD 1 to 400
• Borrow pits outside the enclosure walls: earthwork, around Mound City Group, Middle Woodland (Hopewell)
• Hopeton Earthworks: earthwork, across the Scioto River from Mound City, Middle Woodland (Hopewell)
• Shawnee town of Chillicothe (Tshilikautha division): village, present-day Frankfort, Ross County, shortly before the American Revolution
• Treaty of Greenville: treaty, extinguished Native claims in the Scioto valley, 1795

Stories

Two hundred pipes in Mound 8

Squier and Davis called Mound 8 at Mound City the richest mound they ever opened. It was small and unremarkable outside, but on its burned-clay basin, mixed with ashes, lay nearly two hundred carved stone pipes along with pearl and shell beads and copper ornaments, some covered with silver. The fire had been hot enough to melt copper into lumps and to turn some of the pipestone a glossy black. After long work, many pipes were pieced back together. Their bowls were carved as animals shown true to life: an otter holding a fish, a heron with a fish, a hawk tearing a small bird, along with bears, beavers, frogs, toads, turtles and human heads. The National Park Service now describes the pipes (it counts several hundred) as broken inside a bag before burial, objects deliberately 'ritually killed.' (source)

How Ohio's finest mound collection went to England

Edwin Davis, a Chillicothe doctor, kept the artifacts he and Squier dug from the mounds. After the two men fell out and Davis left for New York in 1850, he spent years looking for an American buyer or institution to keep the collection whole, and parked it at the New York Historical Society in 1858. In 1863 the English collector William Blackmore offered to buy it if no American would. In February 1864 Davis wrote that he 'most profoundly' regretted its going abroad, and he accepted $10,000. Blackmore opened a museum in Salisbury, England, in 1867 to show it, and the Blackmore collection later became part of the British Museum. (source)

Barracks on the mounds

In June 1917 the Army chose the farmland north of Chillicothe for one of 32 training cantonments; farmers who balked at $15 an acre were paid $5 more by local businessmen, and eminent domain settled the rest. A crew of more than 5,000 men put up a building every twenty minutes, and Camp Sherman grew to about 2,000 buildings while Chillicothe swelled from 16,000 to 60,000 people. Local amateur archaeologist Albert C. Spetnagel and the state society's curator Henry Shetrone persuaded the camp commander to turn one barracks so a large mound would not be razed, but streets, barracks and above all the deep water and sewer lines tore through the group. The commander, Capt. Ward Dabney, had promised to build 'in such a way on the mounds that they will not be destroyed,' while warning that pipe lines would have to run through some of them. (source)

The flu and 'Blood Alley'

In 1918 influenza swept through Camp Sherman: 5,686 soldiers fell ill and 1,777 died. The camp was sealed off from Chillicothe. So many men died that the Majestic Theater on Second Street became a temporary morgue, and bodies were stacked there 'like cordwood.' Fluids drained during embalming ran into the alley beside the theater, which earned it the nickname 'Blood Alley.' The embalmed bodies went back to the camp by wagon, with funeral hymns playing through the streets, and then home by train. (source)

Rebuilding Mound City from an 1848 map

When the Army pulled out, Spetnagel's Rotary Club committee and the state society worked to save what was left. William C. Mills and Henry Shetrone dug fourteen of the mounds in 1920 and 1921, paid for largely by Columbus Dispatch editor Arthur C. Johnson and the Wolfe family, and concluded that the 'altars' Squier and Davis had seen were cremation basins, not places of sacrifice. After Harding's proclamation in 1923, workers cleared fifty wagonloads of camp debris in the fall of 1925, deep-plowed the ground, and found the bases of twenty-four mounds and the walls by following the Squier and Davis map. Every mound and wall now visible is a restoration built on those intact bases; Mound 15 was left unrestored, with posts marking the floor plan of its building. (source)

Timeline

• c. AD 1 to 400: People of the Hopewell culture build a low square enclosure and at least two dozen mounds over ceremonial buildings on the Scioto's second terrace. (source)
• c. 1000 to 1650: Fort Ancient farming villages occupy the Scioto valley. (source)
• 1795: The Treaty of Greenville extinguishes American Indian claims in the Scioto valley. (source)
• 1796: Nathaniel Massie arrives four miles south of the mounds to lay out Chillicothe, in Virginia's military district; a 1,300-acre tract including the mounds soon passes to him. (source)
• 1808: A Chillicothe newspaper reports on the collection of mounds north of town. (source)
• 1832: George Shriver buys the land holding the mounds; his family keeps it until 1917. (source)
• 1846: Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis conduct an extensive investigation of the mounds at Mound City. (source)
• 1848: Squier and Davis publish the site as Plate XIX, 'Mound City,' in Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. (source)
• 1861: Local Civil War militia drill on the ground and call it Camp Logan. (source)
• 1864: Davis, unable to find an American buyer, sells his collection of mound artifacts to Englishman William Blackmore for $10,000; it is sold on to the British Museum in 1931. (source)
• 1917: In June the Army begins building Camp Sherman on some 2,000 acres north of Chillicothe, covering the mounds with two-story wooden barracks. (source)
• 1917: On September 5 the first draftees arrive at Camp Sherman. (source)
• 1918: The 83rd Division leaves Camp Sherman on June 5, the first division from the camp to ship out to Europe. (source)
• 1918: Influenza strikes the camp: 5,686 cases and 1,777 deaths, with Chillicothe's Majestic Theater used as a temporary morgue. (source)
• 1920: On June 16, William C. Mills and Henry C. Shetrone of the state historical society begin excavating the mounds, four of them half-covered by barracks. (source)
• 1921: A second season of excavation ends; fourteen of the 24 mounds recorded by Squier and Davis have been examined. (source)
• 1923: On March 2, President Warren G. Harding signs Proclamation 1653 creating Mound City Group National Monument on 57 acres, cared for by the state society under a War Department license. (source)
• 1925: On October 1, clearing of Camp Sherman debris begins, and the mounds and walls are rebuilt from the Squier and Davis map, a job finished in spring 1926. (source)
• 1927: The land just south of Mound City passes to the Department of Justice for a federal reformatory. (source)
• 1933: An executive reorganization moves the monument to National Park Service administration, though the state society keeps day-to-day care. (source)
• 1946: The Park Service revokes the state society's license and takes over management of Mound City Group. (source)
• 1961: The Mound City visitor center is dedicated on May 14, with archaeologist John L. Cotter as speaker. (source)
• 1980: Congress adds part of the Hopeton Earthworks to the monument and orders a study of other area sites. (source)
• 1992: On May 27 Congress renames the monument Hopewell Culture National Historical Park and authorizes adding High Bank Works, Hopewell Mound Group and Seip Earthworks. (source)
• 2023: UNESCO inscribes the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, including Mound City and four other park units, on the World Heritage List. (source)

Sources

• en.wikipedia.org: Hopewell Culture National Historical Park
• en.wikipedia.org: Camp Sherman (Ohio)
• nps.gov: mound city group
• nps.gov: historic figures in hopewell archeology
• nps.gov: lawsandpolicies
• nps.gov: faqs
• nps.gov: before camp sherman
• nps.gov: camp sherman ohio
• nps.gov: influenza at camp sherman
• archive.org: amidstancientmon00cock djvu.txt
• archive.org: ancientmonuments00squi djvu.txt
• whc.unesco.org