As It Were: Mounds didn’t stand in way of Columbus’ progress – The Columbus Dispatch

The story often is told that no people were living on the wooded High Banks opposite Franklinton at the Forks of the Scioto when the Ohio General Assembly chose the place to be the new capital city of Columbus in 1812.

Although this generally was true a few squatters were about the account ignores the fact that people had been living here for several thousand years.

The Native American tribes of Wyandot, Delaware and Shawnee had left the Ohio country prior to the founding of Columbus. Prior to their arrival, central Ohio had been home to the prehistoric Adena, Hopewell and other people for hundreds of years. These people left behind characteristic earthen enclosures for burial, ceremony and defense. They came to be called the Mound Builders.

That brings us to Mound Street.

When surveyor Joel Wright was commissioned to lay out the town of Columbus, he did so rather efficiently, giving most north-south streets such numerical names asThird, Fourth and Fifthand giving governmentally descriptive names to the east-west streets, such as State, Town and Rich. The exceptions were the two main streets of High and Broad.

And then came Mound Street.

Laying out streets in a forest, Wright soon discovered a 40-foot-high mound in the middle of High Street. Skirting the problem, he curved High Street around the mound and named the crossing thoroughfare Mound Street. And there things stood for some time, with local people using clay from the mound for occasional buildings.

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But eventually, a large mound was in the way of a growing capital city. In 1888, local journalist James Linn Rogers, a great-grandson of founder Lucas Sullivant, described what occurred next.

One of the most pretentious mounds of the county was that which formerly occupied the crowning point of the highland on the eastern side of the Scioto River … on the southeast corner of Mound and High streets in Columbus. Not a trace of this work is left. … When the first settlers came, it was regarded as a wonder. Yet it was not spared. The expansion of the city demanded its demolition and therefore this grand relic of Ohios antiquity was swept away.

From the best information to be had at this time, the mound must have been quite 40 feet in height above the natural surface of the river terrace or bluff. It is said to have been a shapely and graceful structure, with gradual slopes in all directions, save to the southward, where the declination was somewhat abrupt. … As was usual with such works, it was in the form of a truncated cone, and if we accept its reported height, its diameter on the level surface at the top was certainly one hundred or more feet. … That its proportions were ample is attested by the fact that a large double frame house stood on its summit. Dr. Young, who erected this building, was in later years succeeded in its occupancy by several well-known families of the town.

Oak trees 3 feet in diameter grew upon the mound in those days, and it is stated that five large locust trees were rooted in the level surface on its summit. Such was the condition of the work up to the time when the citys streets encroached upon its slopes. When its destruction began (in the early 1830s), two forces of excavators pushed into it from north to south until they met, and High Street became continuous in a straight line.

The outer covering of the mound consisted of hard clay followed successively and regularly down to the base by stratifications of gravel and sand, much of which now forms the bed of some of the principal streets of the neighborhood. While the excavation was going on, many human bones were unearthed which crumbled to dust as soon as exposed to the air but were probably not remains of the mound building race. … All who remember the opening of this mound have a mite of information to add to the story of its demolition. One says utensils of various kinds were found; another that trinkets were discovered; a third that the father of the late William Platt found a skull so large it would go over his head; a fourth that a silver buckle was turned up by the spade and so on.

But none of these statements can now be verified by the identification of the articles taken from the mound, every trace of them having been lost. … The natural elevation is such that when artificially increased 40 feet, an extensive view of the upper Scioto Valley was obtained, and this has led to the general belief that the mound was a prominent signal station from which communication by beacon light could be had.

In any case, a bit of the mound does survive. Clay from the mound was used to make bricks for the new 2-story statehouse in 1816. When that building burned in 1852, the bricks from the burned building were used in the new statehouse still standing on Statehouse Square.

Local historian and author Ed Lentz writes the As It Were column for ThisWeek Community NewsandThe Columbus Dispatch.

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As It Were: Mounds didn't stand in way of Columbus' progress - The Columbus Dispatch