Geological age ~375 Mya Devonian shale (Ohio Shale, Olentangy Shale); earthworks built on Pleistocene glacial outwash terraces.
Epoch Late Devonian.
Native lands Adena (c. 1000 BC-100 AD) and Hopewell (c. 1 CE-400 AD) cultures constructed the Mound City earthworks; no direct genealogical link between Hopewell builders and any historically documented tribe has been established; Chalahgawtha (principal-town) division of the Shawandasse Tula (Shawanwaki/Shawnee) returned to the Scioto valley c. 1738 following Haudenosaunee dispersal of Shawnee from the region in the 1670s-80s; the Scioto River Chalahgawtha town (c. 1758-1787) stood on the Scioto west bank near Paint Creek approximately 2-3 miles from Mound City, housing approximately 1,200 people including Tecumseh (b. 1768); Chillicothe, meaning principal town of the Chalahgawtha sept, was the moving political capital of the Shawnee nation with multiple documented locations across southern Ohio; Myaamia (Miami) held the Miami River valleys to the west; Shawnee and Miami lands ceded via Treaty of Greene Ville (August 3, 1795), Article 3 boundary and Article 4 relinquishment, with Shawnee receiving $1,000 annual annuity goods; remaining Shawnee removed west via Treaty with the Shawnee 1831 under Indian Removal Act 1830.
Displacement & Tenure Ceded via Treaty of Greene Ville (1795, Article 3); Mound City tract entered Virginia Military District ownership c. 1796-1798 when frontier land speculator Nathaniel Massie surveyed and acquired the land; Shriver family held title from 1832; Civil War militia used the site as Camp Logan drill ground in 1861; woodland cleared beginning c. 1856 and smaller mounds plowed under during agricultural use; U.S. Army purchased the land in 1917 and established Camp Sherman (construction began June 21, 1917), a 9,700-acre WWI training cantonment built over and around the earthworks, with more than 120,000 soldiers passing through before decommissioning 1921; Ohio Historical Society advocacy resulted in designation as Mound City Group National Monument via Proclamation 1653 (President Warren G. Harding, March 2, 1923) under the Antiquities Act (34 Stat. 225); Hopeton Earthworks added via Public Law 96-607 (1980); redesignated Hopewell Culture National Historical Park via Public Law 102-294 (May 27, 1992), adding Hopewell Mound Group, High Bank Works, and Seip Earthworks; inscribed UNESCO World Heritage Site as Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks (list no. 1689, criteria i and iii) September 19, 2023.
Shadow History Squier and Davis opened mounds at Mound City in 1846, recovering approximately 200 stone effigy cremation pipes from Mound 8 (Mound of Pipes), the majority of the collection sent to the British Museum in London where it remains today; Warren K. Moorehead excavated the Hopewell Mound Group using horses and scrapers 1891-1892, obliterating stratigraphic context to collect artifacts for display at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where the collection remains at the Field Museum; U.S. Army construction at Camp Sherman 1917 demolished virtually all mounds at Mound City except the large central Mound 7 to grade barracks, roads, pipelines, and railroad lines; mounds #13 and #23 were specifically cut down; excavation of the destroyed Mound 13 base in 1921 recovered cremated remains of 20 Hopewell individuals and a mica-lined grave representing only what was preserved at the base level, with all upper-context material permanently destroyed; artifacts unearthed during Army construction were taken as military souvenirs; the 813th Pioneer Infantry and other African American segregated units of the 92nd Division trained at Camp Sherman under white officers per Army policy; 1,777 soldiers died of influenza at Camp Sherman during the 1918 pandemic, with 125 deaths in a single day on October 9, 1918, and approximately 60% of Chillicothe's civilian population infected; all leveled mounds were reconstructed by Ohio Historical Society from the 1846 Squier-Davis survey maps, the original fill and artifact context permanently destroyed.
Ecology Mixed-grass meadow and early successional floodplain woodland on Scioto River glacial outwash terraces; Mound City unit comprises approximately 40 acres managed hay field, 40 acres mixed mesophytic forest, and reconstructed earthworks on managed turf; 438 vascular plant species in 281 genera and 93 families documented across all park units (17% of Ohio's total flora; 65 new county records); habitat for Henslow's Sparrow (species of conservation concern in Eastern Tallgrass Prairie region); Ohio state-listed Spiranthes ovalis (oval ladies'-tresses) and Eleocharis ovata (ovate spike-rush) documented within park.
Hydrology Scioto River watershed; Mound City Group on the west bank of the Scioto River north of Chillicothe, situated on Pleistocene glacial outwash terraces; Scioto River drains approximately 7,956 sq mi of central Ohio to the Ohio River; park units span Scioto River and Paint Creek drainages across Ross County.
Acreage 1,170
GPS 39.3758° N, 83.0064° W
Hopewell Culture National Historical Park I · 2026-04-20
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