Mound City is a quiet place, set in a grassy enclosure on the bank of the Scioto River just north of Chillicothe in southern Ohio. It looks like a low earth wall with a gap in it, and inside are about two dozen mounds of different sizes. They were built around two thousand years ago by the people we call the Hopewell, who created a vast network of ceremonial earthworks across the Ohio Valley. The site is part of Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, and in 2023 it was recognized by UNESCO among the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks.
The mounds covered burials and ritual deposits that held extraordinary goods. Hopewell artisans collected mica from the Appalachians, copper from the Great Lakes, obsidian from Yellowstone and shells from the Gulf, then shaped them into ornaments, effigy pipes and cutouts. It is one of the astonishing facts of North American prehistory that this network of exchange reached across a continent. The mounds were also damaged in modern times. During the First World War, the US Army built Camp Sherman over the ground, flattening part of the earthworks, and the site was later reconstructed.
The riding around the area is gentle and agricultural. Route 104 and Route 35 run through the Scioto valley with rolling farmland, tobacco barns and creeks lined with sycamores. Hills rise to the east and south, toward the forests of Hocking Hills and Scioto Trail State Forest, where the roads become tighter and more fun. Chillicothe itself was Ohio's first state capital, and the old downtown has some handsome nineteenth-century buildings and a few good diners. Fuel stations are plentiful in town.
A few things are worth knowing. The visitor center at Mound City has a small museum and a short film that explains the site, and the walk around the earthworks takes only a short time. Go in the morning when the light is low across the grass, and the mounds show up as gentle swells. Autumn is a lovely season in this valley, with the hills turning color and the air crisp. Spring brings flooding to the lowlands in some years.
The nearby High Bank Works, another part of the same park, includes an octagon and a circle built with remarkable precision and aligned to the moon's cycles. It is a good second stop, and it deepens the sense of how sophisticated these builders were.