Circleville Township, Pickaway County

How Circleville Township, Pickaway County began

Circleville Township was set off from Washington Township only in the spring of 1833, decades after the county seat at its center had already been platted in 1810 directly within and around a circular and square Hopewell-culture earthwork, the shape that gave the city, and later the township, its name. Antiquarian Caleb Atwater described the earthworks in detail before they were dismantled piecemeal between 1837 and 1856, when the town's residents 'squared' its circular street plan into an ordinary grid a quarter at a time. A wooded ridge southeast of the city still holds the Luthor List Mound, an undisturbed Adena burial mound that survived only because its site was never worth clearing for a plow. Two rival pioneer towns nearby, Jefferson and Livingston, lost the contest to become county seat and disappeared entirely within a few decades of their founding.

Incorporated spring of 1833, set off from Washington Township.

Where the name comes from

The township takes its name from Circleville, the county seat at its center, which was itself named for the shape of the ancient earthwork it was built within: a nearly perfect circle, 69 rods in diameter, adjoined on the east by an equally precise square of 55 rods to a side. The 1906 county history quotes at length from Caleb Atwater's early description of these 'ancient works,' one of the earliest scholarly accounts of a Hopewell earthwork in Ohio, published in his 1820 'Description of the Antiquities Discovered in the State of Ohio' and again in his 1833 'Western Antiquities.'

Before the town

The site chosen for the town of Circleville in 1810 was, by the settlers' own account, selected specifically because a Hopewell-culture earthwork already stood there: a true circle bounded by two concentric walls with a deep ditch between them, joined on its east side to a true square bounded by a single wall. Caleb Atwater, who examined the works before the town consumed them, recorded eight gateways into the square fort and one into the circle, each guarded by a small mound about four feet high; a large mound near the circle's center carried a semicircular pavement of river pebbles on its eastern side, fronting the fort's single gateway. Atwater and later writers attributed the works, along with the many other mounds and enclosures of the Ohio Valley, to a vanished 'Mound Builder' culture; archaeologists now classify such geometric earthworks as Hopewell, built roughly 100 BC to AD 500, though no source consulted gives an excavation date or artifact inventory specific to the Circleville works themselves, which were destroyed as the town 'squared' its plat between 1837 and 1856. One prehistoric site does survive intact: the Luthor List Mound, also called the Burning Mound, a 12-foot Adena burial mound on a wooded ridge along the Kingston Pike southeast of the city, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. No source consulted names a historic Native nation, village, or trail specifically within Circleville Township as distinct from the earthworks themselves; the documented Shawnee towns of the 1770s lay south of the city on the Pickaway Plains, covered in the Pickaway Township file. No county-level file yet exists for Pickaway County to point to for the wider Native history of the area.

Nations recorded here: Hopewell culture, Adena culture.

• Circleville circular and square earthworks (earthwork) — site of present-day Circleville, destroyed 1837-1856, Hopewell, roughly 100 BC to AD 500 (archive.org)
• Luthor List Mound (Burning Mound) (mound) — along the Kingston Pike, southeast of Circleville, Adena, Woodland period (en.wikipedia.org)

Timeline

1. c. 100 BC - AD 500 — Hopewell-culture people build a circular earthwork with a joined square enclosure on the ground that becomes the site of Circleville.
2. 1810 — The town of Circleville is platted within and around the ancient earthworks, chosen over rival sites Jefferson and Livingston partly because the fortifications were already standing; the first lots are sold September 10-12.
3. 1814 — The General Assembly passes an act, in December, incorporating the town of Circleville, then still part of Washington Township.
4. 1833 — Circleville Township is set off as a separate township from Washington Township in the spring.
5. 1837 — The General Assembly authorizes the first alteration, or 'squaring,' of the circular town plat; the southeast quarter is squared that March.
6. 1838 — On September 13, the parties squaring the town take the steps to convert the northwest quarter of the circle, receiving their deed from the county on October 4; Wikipedia's own account instead dates this quarter's squaring to September 1837, a discrepancy we could not resolve.
7. 1849 — The northeast corner of the circle is squared.
8. 1856 — The southwest corner is reformed, completing the squaring; all physical trace of the Hopewell earthwork at Circleville is gone.
9. 1974 — The Luthor List Mound, southeast of Circleville, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 16.

Stories

A Fort Chosen for a County Seat

When the commissioners appointed to fix the seat of Pickaway County looked over their options in 1810, one site had a feature none of the others could match: a pair of ancient earthworks, a perfect circle joined to a perfect square, still standing with walls up to twenty feet high and covered in heavy timber. Caleb Atwater, who studied the works before they vanished, counted eight gateways into the square fort and found a mound near its center topped by a pavement of river pebbles, fronting the single gate into the circular fort next door. The commissioners chose the earthworks over the rival village of Jefferson, laid out by Henry Nevill a few years earlier, and over Livingston, a rough settlement on the eastern edge of the Pickaway Plains that by 1840 had shrunk to 85 people and today leaves no trace at all. Circleville took its very shape, and its name, from the fortification it was built inside.

Squaring the Circle

For years after Circleville was platted around its ancient circle, some residents grumbled that the round street plan, still visible in the layout of downtown into the twentieth century, was awkward and its odd-shaped lots hard to sell. In March 1837 the General Assembly finally authorized the town to alter its own plat, and the work proceeded not all at once but corner by corner: the southeast quarter that spring, the northwest quarter over the following year, the northeast corner in 1849, and the southwest corner last of all in 1856, nearly twenty years after the project began. By the time the last quarter was reformed into ordinary rectangular blocks, every remaining trace of the Hopewell earthwork that had stood on the site for more than a thousand years, and that had given the town both its site and its name, was gone.

Photographs

Local history sources: archive.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org

Every historic place in Pickaway County on the full map

Sand-and-gravel wells in the Scioto River valley aquifer at the city's Island Road well field/treatment plant site, just east of the river. The water here

• Circleville City86% of residentsScioto River valley aquifer (sand & gravel wells)
• Earnhart Hill Water District13% of residentsScioto River valley (Teays) aquifer wells
• South Bloomfield Village0% of residentsGroundwater wells (3 wells)
• Ross County Water Co. Inc0% of residentsTeays Valley Aquifer (buried valley groundwater)

Nursing homes (1)

Private schools (1)

Superfund sites (1)

Facilities reporting toxic releases (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (5)

Mounds and earthworks (1)

Money issues on the ballot since 2020: 1 of 3 passed; of those asking for new or higher taxes, 1 of 2.

Ballot issues

Elections for office

Winners in bold. Results from the county board of elections' official canvass unless marked.

Auditor of State record

• No fiscal caution, watch or emergency on the Auditor of State's lists.
• Financial Audit, 2023 to 2024, released 2026-06-11
• Financial Audit, 2021 to 2022, released 2024-09-17

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