One Stop Ohio

One camping stop, one visit site!

We stayed in Buckeye Lake for 4 nights, which gave us time to recuperate from the last 2 weeks! The middle day we drove ~160 miles round trip to Chillecothe (Ohio’s 1st capital, apparently) to…

Visit 1 new National Park Site:

Hopewell Culture National Historical Park (#355), where nearly 2000 years ago, Native Americans built dozens of monumental mounds and earthen enclosures in southern Ohio. These earthwork complexes were ceremonial landscapes used for feasts, funerals, rituals, and rites of passage associated with a Native American religious movement that swept over half the continent for almost 400 years. We caught a Ranger Tour at Mound City Group and walked among the earthworks there on our own, before visiting the other three sites, Seip Earthworks, Hopewell Mound Group, and Hopeton Earthworks. Many of the Mounds are gone (e.g. farmed over, used for army training), but the history is fascinating, and not like other mounds we’ve visited, where the mounds were used for a variety of purposed. Here, the mounds cover up collapsed buildings where ceremonies/burials had taked place, to mark/save them? Also the consistent geometry across sites of 1 Square & 2 Circle is fascinating. Hard to explain. They also traveled and/or traded far afield, e.g. they’ve found Pipestone around the mounds from Pipestone, Minnesota, shells from the Gulf of Mexico. (Gail was even wearing her pipestone earrings for the tour!)

Hopewell Culture NHP-Ranger explaining the layered structure of the mounds…clay & sand layers, topped with gravel.
Hopewell Culture NHP-Ranger explaining the rare elliptical mound.
Hopewell Culture NHP-the one restored mound at Seip
Hopewell Culture NHP-even with pictures, hard to explain