The Odd Fellows Cemetery Mounds. Newtown, OH

One of the most easily identifiable mounds in the area is known as the Odd Fellows Cemetery Mound and it is located in Newtown, Ohio, one of Cincinnati's oldest communities located along the Little Miami. Founded in 1792, Newtown was originally known as Mercersberg, and settlers who came up the river to this new settlement found the area covered with mounds, earthworks and artifacts spanning the thousand plus years that native people occupied this fertile area. When Philip Turpin, an early settler in the area, constructed his stone house on Route 32 in 1800, he reported uncovering fifty skeletons while digging the cellar. In fact there is hardly a part of Newton that isn't built upon the remnants of ancient settlements and burials. Sadly, you would pretty much never know it by driving through this small town today. Nearly every mound has been destroyed after 220 years of development. The Odd Fellows Cemetery Mound survived because pioneers began burying their own around it, effectively preserving it.

here is the main mound as seen from the road

Also, I think I better add as a side note that the "Odd Fellows Cemetery" was not a cemetery for dead folks who were thought of as "odd" by people in town. Maybe that's a no-brainer to you but nobody ever seems to have heard of the Odd Fellows. They are actually a fraternal organization created to provide service to the community. People usually joined Trade Guilds such as the Masons, but these guys are "odd" in the sense that they come from various professions. Today the cemetery is actually called "Flagstone Cemetery" but the mounds are still known as "Odd Fellows." I know. Confusing.

The mound itself is oval in shape and measures 110 ft. long by 90 ft. wide, and is 11.3 ft tall at the highest point. Now just a couple of things about mounds. We do not know everything about the mounds and their purposes but we do know that they were used often but not always for burials. We believe that full body burials were reserved for only the most important people in their society, with the majority of the dead being cremated. Evidence suggests that when a person of importance died they were placed in a constructed "mortuary house" where the body was prepared. When ready, this structure would be burned with the body inside and then earth was mounded over the rubble. This must have been done with the help of many people as these cultures lacked knowledge of tools that could have sped things up. Dirt was carried in baskets, usually from another location. We know that mounds were often re-used, possibly due to amount of labor needed to construct them, so it is common to find many burials in the same mound, with new layers of mounded dirt added each time, explaining why some of the mounds reached such huge proportions.

 Often found alongside the human remains are personal items and items of significance to their spirituality. Anthropologists call these "grave goods", by the way. These grave goods, when found with skeletal remains often provide us with the most dynamic clues about their lives. For example, in 1948, a mound was excavated on Turpin Farm, not far from the Odd Fellows Cemetery. In it were the remains of a man who has come to be known as the "arrow maker" due to the amount of tools and artifacts found with his remains. These tools included arrow points, turkey leg-bone awls, cutting tools made from beaver teeth, flaking tools, an eagle claw, deer antler, and more. I have to stop right there and let that sink in. I mean, these are the very tools these guys used to make the arrowheads that spring plows turn up in fields all over this area! Turkey leg-bone awl?? Mind. Blown. Additionally, the way they were found suggests that they were carried in a leather pouch that was placed by the head of the arrow maker in his grave.

There is also a smaller mound in the Odd Fellows Cemetery that is known as Odd Fellows Mound #2 (creative name). It is much smaller- so much so that I have to admit I didn't even know it existed until I did some research. At some point in time six graves were dug into the side of the smaller mound but no artifacts were reported to be found.

Here is the second, smaller mound.

You can the rise of it to the right of the Broadwell headstone

 

So who built this mound? Hopewell? Adena? Ft. Ancient? We don't know. Not for sure, anyway. There are no records of the mound having ever been excavated and with no reports of grave goods it can be hard to say. Some sources attribute it to the Adena, the Woodland Indian culture that directly preceded the Hopewell. The Adena are known to have built conical form mounds but there is nothing I see in the shape of this mound that seems to be particularly Adena-esque, but I'm sure there are people who know far more about it than me. Several sites close to the mounds have been identified and excavated as villages including the Perin Site, which now lies beneath the Little Miami Golf Course, and Hahn Field, which is still excavated in the summers. (More about both of those in the future.) All of this is located on the flat, elevated terrace above the Little Miami, with the mounds in this cemetery being located about 2/3 mile south of the river. I don't know if this is true, but I think Round Bottom Road, where the mounds are located, is an ancient road. I think it was a dirt path used by the Indians along the river long before it was paved, and I think it was a game trail winding along the river even earlier. I like to think these mounds were constructed along that path more than two thousand years ago. I will post more on the Newtown sites in the future

At Home In The Little Miami River Valley

To call this blog "The Valley of the Mound Builders" is possibly unfair, as the groups of people who built mounds and earthworks in ancient times did so in many places across the Midwest and the South. But I can't get into all of that- it would take forever and it would be really boring to read through it all so for the sake of this blog, when I say "Mound Builders" I am talking about the people that thrived in present day Ohio during what is known as the "Woodland Period", roughly about 1000BCE-500CE and these cultures included the Fort Ancient, the Adena and the Hopewell.

I am fortunate enough to live in the valley of the Little Miami River which is the ancient homeland of the people we call the Hopewell. If you look at the map in the photo, the Little Miami River is the tributary of the Ohio River highlighted in black in the middle of the purple zone.

So yeah, pretty much Ground Zero for the Hopewell. The vast majority of mounds and earthworks along this river have been destroyed over the years, mostly plowed through to accommodate farming, but not all of them. Today there are more existing mounds and earthworks visible along the Scioto River, but the Little Miami was a favorite and some of the most spectacular clues about these people and their cultures were found in sites along this beautiful valley. It was their main source of water, transportation, and sometimes food. The river contains many species of freshwater mussels, some of them endangered, and these could sustain the people even when game and fish could not be found. I will research and visit these places and try to document what I can about what is left. I will also try to give more information about these cultures, the river valley itself, and anything else that I personally think is interesting.

The river itself was created during the last ice age and spans over 100 miles from its headwaters in Clark County to California, Ohio, where it drains into the Ohio River. The body of water itself was named for the Miami- Native Americans who lived in this area when the first white people arrived. The word "Miami" is Algonquin and means "land between the two rivers". Today those rivers are known as the Great Miami and the Little Miami. The Miami and Shawnee could tell the white settlers nothing about the many mounds and earthworks that dotted the valley. The earthworks were here long before those tribes had flourished in the region and they knew nothing of the people who had created them.

The last thing I should say before I get into the sites themselves is that we basically know very little about these people and what we do know is fairly speculative at best. This is mainly because they had no written language and lived a stone-age existence, so we have no historical records to uncover, no "Rosetta Stone" to decipher, and no inscriptions on anything. We don't even know what they called themselves. "Hopewell" is the name the culture was arbitrarily given in 1891 after Captain Mordecai Hopewell, who's farm in Ross County contained the mounds and earthworks that became the archetype for the culture.

 I hope you enjoy this blog. For me an interest in the Mound Builders is intertwined with a love of the Little Miami itself. Some stretches of it are as untouched and wild as they have always been, without the sounds of traffic or people or problems. When you move through these stretches, with nothing but the white bark of the sycamores in the sun and the Great Blue Herron sailing over the water, you really can picture the way their villages might have looked, the smoke from their fires, even the people themselves along the ancient bluffs. I am fascinated by the echoes of these cultures and I think of them every time I paddle down this quiet river.

Sunrise on the Little Miami River near the mouth of the East Fork, 2014