Hopewell Culture National Historical Park
Grand Rapids, MI to Sandstone, WV | Hopewell Culture National Historical Park | Camping in New River Gorge National Park | January 2023
In planning our trip back to Wilmington and North Carolina, we decided that we should maximize time with family, knowing we would probably have most of January to site see. So we allotted ourselves 2 days to get from Michigan to the Coast, picking one scenic or historic site to stop and enjoy each day.
Our journey through Michigan and Northern Ohio was largely uneventful except that the fog from the morning persisted well into the afternoon, as it did supposedly across most of the Eastern US. Our route through Ohio gained us several new counties without being too painfully slow, and once around Columbus we made our first stop near the town of Chillicothe, OH where we stopped at the visitor center and main site of Hopewell Culture National Historic Park.
The Hopewell Culture is a catch all description of the various groups of people living in the Eastern United States during the first Millennium (0-1000 CE) peaking around 200-500 CE . This culture would have been contemporaneous with the Ancestral Puebloan people of the Colorado Plateau. Linked mostly through trade networks and traditions, the most visible remnant of their society are the earthen mounds which they built. The mounds they built spanned a wide variety of sizes, shapes, and purposes and Effigy Mounds in Iowa would be considered among them. It is worth noting that not all Ancient Mounds are Hopewellian: notably some of the mounds we saw in Mississippi along the Natchez Trace are almost 500-700 years younger and are considered part of the Mississippian Culture.
One particular sub-group of the Hopewell Culture settled along the Scioto River in Southern Ohio and built some of the largest complexes of that time period. Some were documented by Archaeologists but eventually farmers turned the sites into fields and plowed over and around the low earthworks. So was the case of the Mound City Group (which we visited today). And when America joined WWI, they had to rapidly build and expand training centers across the US, including nearby Camp Sherman. Unfortunately, this required building barracks over and on top of the mounds. An Ohio Archaeological group successfully intervened in preserving the largest of the mounds, but most every other above ground structure was leveled.
Following the war and the abandonment of Camp Sherman, a group of Ohio Archaeologists set about reconstructing the mounds, using some of the maps made during the 19th century. Fortunately for all, the mounds tell only half the story, as each mound marks a building location, funeral pyre, and burial. As best archaeologist could tell, the Mound City Group was never inhabited, but was used solely for burial and ceremonial rites. Community members would build a structure and perform ceremonies and burial rites, including cremation and burial, within. Once the ceremony was complete. The structure would be dismantled and a mound would be built. Because of this, while all the above ground mound structures were razed in 1917, a substantial portion of the historic record was preserved under the soil allowing archaeologists to accurately reconstruct the exact layout of the original site.
And so the Mound City Group became the only fully reconstructed Hopewell Mound site. President Harding designated the area as a National Historic Park, and in 1999 several other mound sites in the area were added. Those other sites are scattered across Southern Ohio and so we focused on visiting only the Mound City Group today. We enjoyed walking across the field and among the mounds as well as a short visit down to the Scioto River. We were interested to find out that a whole group of Hopewell Mounds both within the NPS as well as within the Ohio Parks were nominated for inclusion as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008 and that last year a delegation came to visit for their final report which should be coming out soon.
Our major stop for the day complete, we continued on, following the same route through West Virginia as in November. The weather was going to be very pleasant that evening, so we had decided early on that we were going to camp, and we knew just the place: Meadow Creek Campground, just off of I-64 in New River Gorge National Park. And, as fortune would have it, not only is it free, but, with the exception of a couple midnight trains, we had the entire campground to ourselves.
