All I Wanted To Do Was Go Look at Native American Pre-Columbian Earthworks in Ohio--So I Did! (Day 2)

What a difference a day makes!

The day before had been, if not quite Fool's Spring, mild enough that while packing for this overnight trip I'd considered not even bringing my coat, but eventually tossed it into the car anyway, because I'm no fool.

Well, I kind of *am* a fool these days--perimenopause brain fog is hitting me soooooo hard!--but not about the weather, at least.

But regardless, I was VERY glad to have that coat on this day, because look at the snow!

And, of course, the mound!

I promise that I DID do some non-mound activities with my daughter on this trip. We walked around Columbus, browsed a giant bookstore, ate hot chicken that bothered my stomach all night because I'm old, she got me to do an impression of Tor Thom doing the world's worst impression of Kip Grady from Game Changer, she egged me into griping so loudly about the Florida Panthers NHL team that a random guy glared at us (Panthers fans are everywhere, gag!), and just that morning I left my husband sleeping in our hotel room, picked her up from her apartment, and drove her back to our hotel to eat waffles and watch the Olympic men's hockey Gold medal match with me. I had not yet been outraged by the ham-handed misogyny of Team USA, and so we had a glorious time treating the breakfast buffet like a sports bar and cheering a bunch of jerks on to victory. 

But as much as I miss this kid when she's away at school, we're not really sit-and-yappers--you can yap just as well when you're poking around a pre-Columbian mound set in a cemetery next to an abandoned church!

I think it's so interesting to have a mound in a churchyard. The Fairmount Presbyterian Church was organized in 1834, so sayeth this History of Licking County.

I must warn you, though, that the same History of Licking County also sayeth this:

          The mound at Fairmont Church was a lookout mound and it was opened at one time but, I am told, it didn’t contain much. A number of smaller mounds like this have disappeared because of plowing fields over the years. In 1860 a keystone, a small triangular shaped sandstone engraved on both sides with Hebrew letters, was found in a mound near Newark. A Decalogue tablet was also unearthed in this mound. The tablet contained an abbreviated form of the Ten Commandments copied almost entirely from Exodus 20 in the Bible. For years, it was regarded as a hoax, but two Hebrew scholars along with some scientists confirmed it to be true. This tablet is seven inches long, black limestone, and was found in a circular light brown sandstone box with a whitish cement at the edges. The “Holy Stones” (five in number) were found near the intersection of Rt. 13 and Interstate 70 and at another location in Madison Township are still a subject of controversy, but scholars now think that perhaps people from the Mediterranean sea area reached this country in the days of the mound builders. This was long before Columbus came and these people left their messages carved on stones found in the Adena Burial Mounds as well as on rocks throughout North America.

 The author is referring to the Newark Holy Stones, which were a Big Deal back in the 1860s but have since gone the way of the various Oklahoma "runestones" that were talked about when I was a kid. 

Wait, it looks like some people are still talking about the Oklahoma runestones! I guess the Newark Holy Stones have just gone the way that the Oklahoma ones have NOT, lol!

Anyway... Vikings and runestones and Hebrew tablets and angel-human hybrids aside, I can't help but wonder what the congregation of the Fairmount Presbyterian Church thought about putting their Christian cemetery around that clearly pagan monument. It reminds me that when the Sutton Hoo ship burial was excavated, archaeologists discovered that people hundreds of years after that burial, long after all knowledge of it had passed, had been burying their dead around that then-mysterious mound, too. Did that feeling of awe that you get when looking at an ancient monument feel like religious sentiment? Was it the sense of ancient history and connection to the past that they thought translated well to a cemetery? Or did the place maybe just seem important, and that's what people wanted to connect with?

Regardless, it does make a lovely setting for photos, and I have to think that even though the mound is clearly being regularly mowed, it must fare better as cemetery property than it would have in a farm's acreage.

I need to come back here and take more photos on a sunny day!

Okay, remember this map of the earthworks as Squier and Davis saw them back in 1848?

So far, I'd seen most of what was remaining, i.e. the Great Circle (bottom right) and the Octagon and Circle (top left). But there's one little bit left that I hadn't yet seen...

Specifically, this bit!

The site is pretty depressing, bordered by a neighborhood, some kind of warehousy/factory-ish building, and a highway that, incidentally, used to be where the Ohio and Erie Canal ran instead:

The Goodwill at the top is where we got the kid a couple of shirts for job interviews and where I'm still pissed that I didn't buy two vintage green glass ashtrays. The kid said they were tacky, but what the hell does she know? The gas station in the middle is the closest parking I could find to the intersection of the street with the railroad tracks just north of it, which is where the semicircular earthwork on the Squier and Davis map was until it was demolished to make that street and railroad tracks. I hate civilization sometimes.

But still, we made the best of it and had a proper wander in that limited space:

The ridge that's running horizontally across the photo below is the top left edge of the square--I'm inside the square, and the kid is outside of it. The ridge in the background is the outside edge of the avenue that would have led straight towards that now-demolished semi-circle enclosure:

There's an opening where the two ridges meet, but I don't know if that's how it was originally. I also can't imagine that the original square and avenue earthworks were this short:

Because I'm curious and I waste my focus on that which is inconsequential, I even got into Google Earth's historical maps to see if maybe the ridges had looked different, taller or shorter or maybe more of the avenue was evident, 20 or so years ago, but it doesn't look like anything has really changed. And then I got VERY distracted looking for Kinzer Mound in South Salem, which is on the National Register of Historic Places but has its address redacted so I tried searching old Google Earth images, reddit and Facebook posts, property records for the name "Kinzer," etc., and never did find it, but I did waste almost two hours and there's apparently a cool covered bridge in South Salem that I now want to see, so there's that!

Here's me also checking Google Maps to see how far I'd have to walk and in what direction to get to the Great Circle and the Octagon:

The Great Circle is just about three-quarters of a mile from here, and the Octagon is about a mile and a half. Perhaps an adventure for another day!

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All I Wanted To Do Was Go Look at Native American Pre-Columbian Earthworks in Ohio--So I Did! (Day 1)

Well, *technically* all I wanted to do was visit my college kid since she isn't coming home for Spring Break--but she's happy to tag along with any adventure, as is my husband, so that worked out just fine!

Honestly, though, my fever-pitch fervor for earthworks is SO bad. We'd barely rolled onto campus and hugged the kid's neck before I was all, "Sooo... y'all wanna catch up while we walk around Octagon Earthworks?"

Happily, they did!

I even got to play tour guide, because thanks to that time that I just happened to be driving the kid back to school on one of the four days a year that it was formerly open to the public (it used to be leased by a golf course that had, like, a million-year lease already signed, but now it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so Ohio was finally able to boot them and open it up properly to the public), I'm the only one who's been there before!

There's a viewing platform that elevates you a bit above the terrain so you can see some of the earthworks from above:

That's really important, because once you're in them the scale is so massive that it's very hard to visualize what you're walking within:

That outer perimeter isn't really there anymore, nor are the paths that lead away, but you can around walk inside the circle and the octagon.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that the Squier and Davis work that mapped the site is now old enough to be in the public domain, so here:

It's crazy that the site was mapped AFTER they built the Ohio and Erie Canal through part of it, but I'm going to talk more about that later, because OBVIOUSLY I went over there to investigate what was left.

Here it is also in outdoor banner format, lol, and yes, I DO want a large-scale weather-proof map just like this one!

It's so ridiculous that when the site was a golf course, that elevated viewing platform was the only place you were allowed to be to look at the earthworks, because you can barely see them from that platform! Here I am on the platform, looking straight ahead at the path that connects the circle to the octagon. To the left, if I crane, I can see the closer part of the circle, and to the right, if I crane, I can see the closer couple of walls and one mound from the octagon:

But now, THIS is my favorite sign here!

Octagon Earthworks is a lovely site to simply stroll around. Just as promised, we walked the inner perimeter while catching up and gossiping:

The trees wouldn't have been here when the site was in its original use, but there are a few trees that are allowed to grow presently. This site also used to be an encampment for the Ohio National Guard, then part of it was a potato field... and then came the golfers!

Three geniuses, one of whom is graduating with a degree in Environmental Science this May, another of whom still brags an awful lot about the very thorough Ohio state study she led her little homeschoolers through once upon a time, stared in bafflement at this nut for ages before one of us (not me, sigh...), finally said, "It looks kind of like that candy? Oh, it's a buckeye!"

These two really liked the open space within the octagon best:

You can sort of see one of the walls leading off into the distance to the left, but the rest is too far away. The space inside is so big!

I kept wandering off to go hug the little mounds that block the entrances, though. I love a little mound!

So, it's well-established that I love a dedicated, protected earthworks site. I mean, of course! But what I LOVE is a poky, little-known, obscure, under-studied earthwork that's encroached upon by modern civilization in some weird way. I really like that undercurrent of something other and ancient behind the trappings of the everyday. I also love the research aspect, because while these preserved earthwork sites are well-known and Googleable, most of the earthworks still extant are unstudied, poorly mapped, and largely forgotten. 

There are a couple of good historical resources for searching out the thousands of minor mounds in Ohio. The Archaeological Atlas of Ohio has a county-by-county map that's impossible to parse for specific locations, but does show the overall spread and general vicinity, as well as wealth of now-forgotten mounds. The book, for instance, says that the kid's college town used to have 20 known mounds, and now there is definitely just one! A more useable resource is this ZeeMap of Native Sites of Ohio, which looks to have placed the sites from the archaeological atlas onto a Google Map. Whenever I've been able to match one of its mounds with the real mound, they've lined up perfectly, but there are sooooo many sites on ZeeMap that also look like absolutely nothing in real life. Is the site simply gone, or is the ZeeMap location off?

Earlier this year, I treated myself to the very sketchily titled Nephilim Chronicles: A Travel Guide to the Ancient Ruins in the Ohio Valley, because boycotting the economy doesn't count if it's an independent, self-published author. If you can overlook the author's premise that the mounds are the burial sites of angel-human hybrids, it's actually a fairly contemporary guidebook to many of the minor mounds noted in that archaeological atlas and on the ZeeMap. 

And that's what I used to direct us here!

The mound is presented completely without context adjacent to a community sportsball field, but it's this one. 

Over 2,000 years old, and we can just drive up to it, walk around it, and then hop back in the car to head over to spend the evening at the biggest bookstore in Ohio.

Because boycotting the economy doesn't count if you buy it in an independent bookstore!

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I Ate a Pineapple Pork Bun in New York City and I Think I Will Never Be The Same Again

If you thought that bad weather would keep the tourists inside, you would be wrong. We will see all the sights in New York City no matter how cold it is!

We got so turned around attempting to find the right subway line to get us to Brooklyn that we ended up near Rockefeller Plaza, so we figured that we might as well walk over and see if the tree was still up.

It was!

And then the big kid saw the line to get into FAO Schwartz and was all, "Toys?!? TOYS!!!", so somehow we ended up doing that, too.

Of course, as soon as we got into the store and she realized that it was essentially just a mass of wall-to-wall people she wanted to immediately bail, but I said, "Come on, we're already in. Might as well power through."

The first week in January is actually a terrible time to visit FAO Schwartz regardless of the crowds--they were so picked over from holiday shopping, I guess, that although all the shelves were full, they were full with just, like, one or two products per brand, basically. Great if you want a goat cheese Jellycat or a Schleich brachiosaurus painted to look like it works there (which, okay, is kind of cute...)--

--but I kind of wanted to look at *all* the Jellycats, you know? Not just 1,000 copies of the worst one.

Whatever. At least it was warm inside, and it turned out that the subway station we wanted was right near there, after all!

On to DUMBO!

Technically, all people actually wanted to do on this day was walk around Chinatown and eat stuff. But I tacked on first walking across the Brooklyn Bridge TO Chinatown because, come on, it's RIGHT THERE!, and then, well, I tacked on first finding that one perfect photo spot that everybody goes to in DUMBO because if you're at the Brooklyn Bridge, well, then... I mean come on, it's RIGHT THERE!

Just us and 1,000 other tourists seeing the sights!

If you look veeeery closely at the photo below, you can even see a tiny Statue of Liberty. We really saw everything on this trip!

There she is again! 

Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge probably isn't something I need to do again, although I would like to catch a sunrise there, but it was a super easy and pleasant walk that puts you right into an interesting part of Lower Manhattan, a short walk from Wall Street on one side and Chinatown on the other.

We chose Chinatown!

And yes, I did force us a few blocks out of our way just so I could embody that Lumineers song.

It is SO hard for me to narrow down all the places I want to see when I visit somewhere:

But we did our best!

We bought buns and milk tea from Mei Lai Wah--

--and I need to tell you that this pineapple pork bun is the best thing that I have ever eaten in my life:

How do they make that crunchy pineapple topping? It was super crunchy, but it wasn't super sweet so it's not sugar. It was SO good, and I am devastated that I'm not eating it again right now.

We had no organized plan for what little shops and restaurants from my map we actually hit and in what order, so we got a lot of sightseeing done simply by wandering back and forth and around and around doing and seeing everything in the most inefficient manner possible:

Jin Mei Dumplings, cash only and window service only, but you get 15 delicious dumplings for $5!!!

I didn't see a tenth of what I wanted to see by the time we absolutely had to head out, which is always the way, sigh, and I guess it leaves plenty of reasons to come back one day.

Another place I'm coming back to: Madison Square Garden, where I once again managed to score the absolute worst seats in the house!

This game ended up being kind of heartbreaking, because I had to watch Shesterkin get injured (and he's still not back!), and then go on to watch the Rangers flat-out lose to the Mammoth, but at least they scored a couple of points in the meantime--

Here's a spot that I haven't yet made it to even once: the Empire State Building! I just like to look at it from the outside and imagine King Kong climbing it:

Fun fact: the best part of our trip is yet to come!

P.S. Come find me over on my Facebook page, where I often talk about my adventures, experiments, misadventures, and yet more misadventures as I'm doing them!