Miamisburg Mound

Sunday July 3
This morning, we went cycling on the Little Miami trail, Roger and I using our tandem, and Jen using my bike. There were quite a few cyclists out, and lots of people out on the water in canoes or kayaks. Most of the ones we saw, from one of the bridges, most people didn’t seem to be doing much paddling, rather just drifting with the current!
In the afternoon we drove up to Miamisburg to see the Indian mound. Miamisburg Mound is one of the two largest conical mounds in eastern North America. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the mound is 65 feet tall and 800 feet in circumference and contains 54,000 cubic yards of earth. The mound is visible from several miles away because it stands atop a 100-foot high ridge above the Great Miami River.
Excavations conducted in 1869 revealed details of construction suggesting the Adena culture (800 B.C. to A.D. 100) built the mound in several stages. The excavators found a layer of flat stones overlapping like shingles on a roof at a depth of 24 feet below the surface. At one point in its history, therefore, the mound may have had a stone facing. Monuments like Miamisburg Mound served as cemeteries for several generations of ancient Ohioans. There were once an estimated 10,000 American Indian mounds and earthworks in the central Ohio Valley. Today, about 1,000 of those landmarks have survived through private landowners and local, state and federal agencies dedicated to preserving these ancient ruins. The butterfly in my main collage is the Eastern Black Swallowtail. On the way back, we came through Franklin to show her the murals.