The Camden Works

I have a lot of sites that I want to cover but The Camden Works is particularly close to my heart because it was located in Terrace Park, Hamilton County, Ohio, where I live. It makes sense that the spot occupied by the village of Terrace Park today would have been attractive to the mound builders. It is a flat, fertile terrace located high on a bluff above the confluence of the Little Miami and the East Fork; just the sort of spot they seemed to prefer.

Also I should explain that the name "Camden Works" was given because "Terrace Park" didn't exist until 1893. Before that time, a serious effort was made to name the town Camden City. Today all traces of Camden are gone with exception of the pillars at the bottom of Drewry Farm Lane and Wooster Pike. They still read "Camden Terrace Farm", for an early estate on the hill.

Proposed layout for "Camden City", about 1857. "Newtown Rd" is Elm Avenue, the building marked "J.Iuen" was Iuen's Tavern, current site of UDF. Only "Washington St." would make it to Terrace Park.

The first white settlers who arrived here in 1791 most certainly noticed the mounds and earthworks but made no mention of them in surviving papers. It wasn't until the early 19th century, when Cincinnati had become a leading American city that interest in these earthworks began to be documented. The first Cincinnatian to take a serious interest and survey these earthworks was William Lytle, who made an enormous amount of money surveying lands in this area that were given as Revolutionary War grants to veterans. The Lytles had essentially founded the city, William personally founded the University of Cincinnati, and they were considered the first landed millionaires in the West. On a side note, the Lytle's gave the land where their family mansion once stood to be a park for the City of Cincinnati in perpetuity. Later when the city wanted to put a highway through the park they were blocked by the conditions of the gift and the result is Lytle Tunnel, which today runs the highway underneath the park instead. Pretty cool.

Willaim Lytle II, first to survey The Camden Works at Terrace Park

 Lytle drew the following survey of The Camden Works which was reproduced in a work titled "Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley" by Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis for The Smithsonian in 1848.

This is the sketch of The Camden Works produced by Lytle and reproduced by Squire and Davis in 1848.

So what are you looking at in this sketch? This is an aerial view of the earthen walls that made up the amazing formation. The circle and the square were common themes seen in the mound builder's construction, and the long, parallel walls that connect them are an often repeated feature as well. The walls are opened at the corners and in the center of each long stretch with a semi-circular enclosure on one side. How big was it? Hard to say. We are not even sure exactly how it was oriented. Squier and Davis note very little about it saying, "The work indicated by the letter A is situated upon the opposite side of the Little Miami, from that last described. The plan, which is also from a survey by Gen Lytle, sufficiently explains its character. Several mounds occur in the vicinity of this work...".

Unfortunately, the plan by Gen. Lytle does not sufficiently explain its character. At all. I don't know what Squier and Davis are even talking about. It looks like an alien crop circle, there's no indication of direction, orientation, and there are no labeled landmarks such as the river. Luckily, they do mention that similar surveys appear in "Hugh Williamson's work on the climate of America." Yes! Easy enough to find that book, right? Wrong. Impossible to find that book.

Well, almost impossible. J. Huston McCullough, PhD. at Ohio State University did locate Williamson's book on climate for a paper he wrote on the East Fork Works (again, something for a future post). He shows the Camden Works together with the Milford Works on each side of the river:

Wow- a lot more information here. This is a map showing The Camden Works in relation to The Milford Works and the river! This blew me away because you can clearly see the East Fork branching off below. This map, rough as it is, I believe pre-dates the Lytle survey making it the earliest I have found. If you follow the key to this map, it would indicate that the large square is up on the bluff running above the nature preserve in Terrace Park and along Miami Avenue, with the long parallel embankments running down the hillside to the river bottoms where the circle was located, perhaps near present day Edgewater. But again, scale is a huge issue and its hard to tell where this was, exactly. Fascinating!

Then something peculiar happens. Suddenly the description of the Camden Works changes completely. In 1922 book on nearby earthworks, Charles Clark Willoughby described the Camden Works as pictured above saying:

"....A mile or two to the north across the Little Miami River [from the Milford Works] lie the Camden Works consisting of a square and circular enclosure with connecting embankments. Several mounds belong to this group. The Milford and Camden Works were surveyed many years ago by General Lytle of Cincinnati. The plans were reproduced by Squier and Davis who describe them briefly."

I know I keep mentioning the Milford Works and they are equally mysterious and fascinating and I will write more about them in another post later. But I want to get back to the changing description of The Camden Works. So far I have shown you the drawing made by Williamson, a survey done by William Lytle sometime between probably 1801-1809 (family papers show his work attracted the attention of President Jefferson so I'm giving it these years), the description given by Squier and Davis, and a 1923 publication that describes them as well, but clearly used some old sources, possibly (or probably) the same ones we looked at.

Now enter Dr. Charles Metz, a Victorian physician in the prominent Madisonville neighborhood of Cincinnati. He also has a passion for the mound builders and his name will come up often in this blog as he had his hands in sites all over the valley. Dr. Metz describes The Camden Works much differently in his October 1878 paper on "The Prehistoric Monuments of the Little Miami Valley" where he describes it as follows:

 "In the southeast corner of Section 29 at the village of Camden and 300 feet east of the south line of Mr. Galloway's residence is the corner of an embankment which extends east and south to the river. It extends 3/4 of a mile east until it reaches the bank of the river which is here about 40 feet high. The other running south until it reaches the edge of the gravel ridge and then runs east to the river. It encloses from 800 to 1000 acres of ground. This embankment 50 years ago was six feet high and twelve feet wide. It is now scarcely traceable."

 "Mr. Galloway's residence" is a historic home in Terrace Park known as "Gravelotte", situated on Elm Avenue across from the Elementary School, seen here:

So from this description it appears to be an earthen wall that ran roughly from this property straight back to the bluff over the river on Miami, with a second wall running from the property straight towards the bluff on Princeton, then following the ridgeline back to the river. This became the accepted version of The Camden Works. It would have looked something like this:

 Are you freaking out about how awesome this map is? I know- I'm like a professional cartographer.

  So this description of an earthen wall that enclosed some acres at the southern end of the village is what became accepted as the The Camden Works, completely disregarding the amazing earthworks that had been mapped earlier. How did this happen?

Hard to say. Willoughby describes the circle, square and parallel embankments and also adds the mysterious line, "A few less important detached works in the form of circles, parallelograms and parallel embankments lie not far distant." This would indicate even more geometric earthworks in present day Terrace Park or on the river flats nearby, but there is no mention of those again anywhere- and Willoughby himself makes no mention of the earthen wall at all. And what about Dr. Metz stating that the walls enclosed 800 to 1000 acres? Certainly that is a miscalculation unless he is describing a scale much larger than I can picture.

 McCullough suggests that The Camden Works (which he only refers to as part of The Milford Works) were located further north, with the large square up on the bluff of Shawnee Run Road in Indian Hill and the smaller circle somewhere near Michigan Drive in Terrace Park. Is it possible that the greater Camden Works was located here and the earthen wall formation described by Metz is part of the "few less important detached works" described by Willoughby? Hard to say today.

 And just to make matters even worse, a contemporary of Dr. Metz, Clyde Thomas, wrote in 1894 that Squier and Davis lied about the Camden Works altogether saying "Some of the singular works described and figured...are to a large extent imaginary. Of these we may name Nos. 1 and 2, Pl. XXXIV of that work." Well The Camden Works is half of No. 2. I have to say I find this really hard to believe. Why would William Lytle, a wealthy businessman, hike out to the wilderness twenty five miles from home to draw fake surveys? It would be one thing if The Camden Works were proposed to be some ridiculously elaborate animal effigy, but not a simple geometric design like this. That would hardly be worth his time. Anyway it's hard to imagine Lytle, a man of social and political prominence and a leader in business purposely deceiving President Thomas Jefferson. Scroll back up to his portrait if you need assurance. Nope, definitely not the face of a guy who makes up maps for fun.

 

But here's a theory I am proposing: Lets say that when Lytle first came to "Terrace Park" in the first years of the 19th century the earthwork was still entirely intact, with the large square on the high plateau of Terrace Park extending roughly from Douglas Avenue to the bluff on Miami, down to the end of the bluff above Edgewater, back along the bluff at the ends of Lexington, Yale, Floral, and Myrtle, along the bluff to Valley View Lane, then back to Douglas. The parallel embankments would then extend down the hillside to the circle in the bottoms along present-day Edgewater, placing it at the confluence of the two rivers. It would have looked roughly like so:

 Map Drawing Skills: F-



I know that my parallel embankments look short, but remember that they are extending down a steep hill so they appear short from above. Ok, so fast forward to when Dr. Metz visits the site in the 1870s. He describes what is left of it by that time and it looks a little something like this:

 Seriously, I am probably going to get a job making maps because I am obviously amazing at it.

Metz notes that by the time he first saw The Camden Works, it was "scarcely traceable" but "50 years ago was six feet high and twelve feet wide." So he is referencing the way it looked around 1820. Ellis Rawnsley, in his 1992 book, "A Place Called Terrace Park", says that the walls enclosed 80 acres at the southern end of the village, which would correspond to my proposed location and is closer to Williamson's mention that the square encloses 60 acres. For this to be right, I am speculating that the scales of the earlier surveys were not correct but since neither Metz or Lytle could agree on the scale, I am suggesting a third plausible scale.

 And whatever the shape might have been, what were these earthworks used for?

The truth is that we don't know. For decades people believed they were forts or points of military defense, but today most scholars feel that they were related to the spirituality of the mound builders. They lived in a world dominated by Nature. Summer thunderstorms echoing through the valley, spring flowers, the winter winds- everything probably had significance for them. Some feel that these earthworks provided a place to gather and worship whatever they worshipped. Certainly it would have taken the labor of many to complete such a huge work, but archeological evidence does not suggest a large population living together here. It is likely that the mound builders lived in small villages close to each other and used these earthworks as central gathering locations. We do know that The Camden Works and various mounds in and around Terrace Park were excavated. There was a mound at the end of Douglas Avenue, and a large mound about where Wooster Pike meets Western Ave. Metz notes casually that pottery was discovered but we have no further information about what it looked like or where it is now. It is unfortunate too because he noted that the amount of artifacts recovered from the Camden Works made it "the most interesting and unique" site. Unfortunately all of that is lost to time.