USA > Ohio > Brown County > History of Clermont and Brown Counties, Ohio, from the earliest historical times down to the present, V. 1 > Part 4
USA > Ohio > Clermont County > History of Clermont and Brown Counties, Ohio, from the earliest historical times down to the present, V. 1 > Part 4
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39
There is no need to gild the gold of the many descriptions of this and the associated masterpieces of the people who built with no help from metal tools. But there is need to mention them as the environment that once and long ago controlled the land of Clermont. Fort Ancient with walls angling through a length of five miles to enclose a hundred and twenty-six acres of lofty hill land on the eastern side of the Little Miami, and, by its stream. about forty miles from the Ohio, was built
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according to their ideas of greatest strength not only for the protection of the immediate vicinity, but also for greater ser- vice on the line of constant annoyance to all whose game was choicely fed on the blue grass of the Silurian Island. This massive fortress was supported twenty-five miles to the west by the shorter but very strong walls around seventeen acres on the Great Miami about three miles below Hamilton. Some call this the Butler County Fort, and others name it the Forti- fied Hill. Thirty-five miles farther southwestward, Miami Fort covered twelve acres commanding the junction of the Great Miami and the Ohio. Between Miami Fort and Forti- fied Hill, ninety-five acres were included in what is con- sidered a fortified camp known as the Colerain Works. The plan also included defenses at Dayton and Piqua.
As attack from the north was not favored by the crooked course of the East Fork of the Miami, the eastern support of Fort Ancient was fixed in Highland county, where a huge wall around thirty-five isolated acres some five hundred feet above the adjacent lowlands by Brush creek is called Fort Hill. Of all, this fort is most remote from former extensive population. Still, whoever visits these strictly military sites must be prepared generally for the most inaccessible head- lands in the vicinity. Ten miles down Brush creek reaches the famous Serpent Mound in Adams county, which the criti- cal claim was located there, because the effigy of the Serpent was begun by nature. Thus, through reverential awe, it may have been that Fort Hill was fitly located to prevent insult to the sacred ground. A trail of about twenty miles would have brought help to or from Spruce Hill Fort enclosing a hundred and forty forbidding acres on Paint creek. This was the largest and strongest stone structure short of Mexico.
Thus, roughly stated, on or near an arc with a cord of less than one hundred miles, from Miami Fort to Spruce Hill Fort-from the mouth of the Great Miami to near Bainbridge in Ross county, the most famous effigy in the world, one of their largest camp sites, and five out of six of their strongest fortifications were located. Another great camping ground at Newark, and the sixth great fortress. Glenwood Fort. in Perry county, protected the Hocking and Muskingum valleys from invasion, and so completed the Mound Builder's main line of defense.
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With all that can be gleaned from comparative investiga- tion, and for those accustomed to notice the ways of war worn deep by the march and countermarch of many armies contending through long divisions of time for the possession of earth's fairest plains, there is much need for patience with those who flout the suggestion of a strife centered in South- western Ohio, between the roving hunters and the plodding grainmen. The supposition of such strife is consistent with the experience of other times and places. To the objection that the Northern Indians were too few to occasion such ex- treme defense, it may be answered that from Braddock's Defeat or before, to Wayne's Victory or since, it is not prob- able that two thousand warriors were ever in one battle against our forefathers. The raids were generally made by scores rather than hundreds. Yet there was no lack in the dramatic interest inspired. Others profess a doubt of the value of the forts. The same remark was made at Bunker Hill. It is true : their castle's strength might not long laugh a modern siege to scorn. But arm to arm, whether with ar- row or thrusting spear or with repeating rifles, their restored parapets would be no easy thing to storm. It is idle to deny the logic that requires belief. There was strife elsewhere, but none like what is manifest between the Scioto and Miamis, and none that happened with such cogent reason as that which forced the Toltecan farther southward than the Appalachian cared to follow.
With a comprehensive view of their ruins, fancy may con- jure up many a stirring day, when pitiless raids wasted the growing corn, desolated the villages, and frighted the planters into ever narrowing limits; when the swift runners with evil tidings ceased to dare the perilous race with stealthy foes; when the signal fires failed to burn because the watchers were few and fearful; when the dreamers of strange designs were driven from the matchless charm of the Muskingum ; when the broken bands came westward and brought a double confusion along the once bountiful Scioto; when the northern war for southern plunder backed westward on Fort Ancient and made the Valley of the Miamis the final battle ground between an unrelenting savagery and a humble barbarism too peaceful to live; when hungry guards weakly manned the walls against
ANCIENT WIRA ..
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CLERMONT CY OHIO.
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the ever coming attacks along the trails from the Straits be- tween the frigid fur country and the pleasant corn lands ; when dispairing defenders driven from the farther forts at last huddled at Miami Fort; and, when, boating down the Ohio forever away, the mourning exiles found consolation in be- lieving their dead beneath the beautiful mounds too deeply buried to ever feel a touch of cruel change.
Under the nearby protection of the great forts to the north the marks of the Mound Builders southward to the Ohio, from the Miami to the Serpent Mound belong mainly, perhaps entirely, to the ceremonial type. In this region about four hundred earthworks have been noted; and of these over two hundred are or were within the present limits of Clermont county. Among these several enclosures could once but not now be clearly traced. Much the greater extent of those en- closures was in Miami and Union townships about what was once called the Forks of the Miami. The largest was a square and circle on the north side terrace of the East Fork with and near Greenlawn cemetery. Sixty years ago the ground was shaded by ancient sugar trees and kept smoothly open by herds that grazed along the firm ridges then some eight feet in height and half as much in level width across the top. Each of the gateways was fronted some twenty feet away by a small mound that may have been palisaded at a deadly distance for lancers and bowmen. The four walls with inside ditches and the four mounds were then kept as a part of the fine estate taken from the original owner and transmitted by Philip Gatch of heroic pioneer fame, except that the eastern and western walls were graded through for the Milford and Chil- licothe Turnpike. And so this noble and beautiful pre-historic scene might have remained and should have become a proud part of the most beautiful burial place within the eastern reach of Cincinnati. But a furious storm wrecked the sacred grove, and, like the forest of Salmygondin, the trees were burnt for the sale of the ashes. Since then, the plow has left scarcely a trace for the observation of travelers flitting by on the Cin- cinnati & Columbus Traction cars through the once guarded space, without a suggestion of the strangely busy throngs sometime gathered there for patriotic exhortation and priestly benediction before going to unavailing battle for the lovely land.
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A somewhat smaller square and circle stood a scant mile southward across the river on a farm long owned by the Ed- wards family. Some two miles up the south terrace on the lands of the pioneers, Ira Perin and William Malott, were two small squares each with no circle. About five miles up the river on the east side of Stonelick on the Patchell lands a fine circle of about eight acres with no square was crossed by the Milford and Chillicothe Pike, which also passes by a group of mounds near Marathon, and also near more about Fayetteville. The far past is made to seem less remote by noting that this great highway of Brown and Clermont counties goes west by the noted pre-historic sites of Red Bank and Madisonville near which the Colerain Works interlock with the western forts and with what was great in front of the mouth of the Licking. Going east through Highland county, that pike is good for much of the way to Fort Hill and the Serpent Mound, while Spruce Hill Fort and the Paint Creek tepees are directly on the road to the remarkable antiquities of the Scioto Valley only some eighty miles from Milford. By the mouth of the East Fork in Anderson township, in Hamilton county, and about two miles from the Gatch enclosure is the noted Turner group of works that connect with the Newtown mounds and the Red Bank chain of villages.
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The places chosen for habitation prove that rich land was appreciated. From the big circle near the mouth of Stone Lick, the scattering traces up that rapid stream and through Stone Lick township thicken toward its northeastern line, where the diminished heights encircle a lonely but pretty val- ley of some forty acres made very fertile by the elements washed from the weathered hills. Several mounds once adorned summits not far from this sequestered vale, at first the home of the pioneer, John Metcalf, and then of Ira Wil- liams. No enclosure enhanced the scene which must have been a place of much resort and probably the site of one or several tepees, whence the people hasted away, perchance, when the forts failed and left the women and children without help to carry their wealth of implements along to the safety sought but never found. For, in few places or none in Old Clermont has the plow lifted to modern gaze such a profusion
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of flint and granite tools as has therein been found, and thence, like Wycliff's ashes, been "scattered wide as the waters be." So long as the odd stones were held to be the abandoned and altogether useless trumpery of the recent Indians, the shapely granites and flints made with the utmost patience of many lives were carefully gathered and carelessly heaped where plows and hoes would not again be dulled. When more dis- cerning culture asserted them to be wonderful survivals with a marvelous story from a voiceless past, and when bartering agents for far away collectors went seeking them along coun- try lanes, the lightly valued and never-to-be recovered tokens of a vastly ancient possession were sold for a petty price and with wonder at the buyer's folly. Still, some of the best were kept, from which several of the most excellent came to the writer. One much admired is a curved flint knife ingeniously flaked to fit four different ways of grasping and present four different angles for cutting.
The general effacement of mound work elsewhere has had much regrettable repetition in Brown and Clermont. While living in Williamsburg, in the midst of his overwork between 1800 and 1810, while the lines were still plain, General Lytle made careful surveys of the earthworks east of Milford. The square was 950 feet on each side with a gate at each corner and in the middle of the sides. The circle was irregular to fit a very ancient course of the river. The large circle was con- nected by parallel walls with a small circle of 300 feet in di- ameter on top of the island like hill now marked by the water tower. Fan-like walks also extended down the river. This and the plan of the Edwards' works across the river, were published in. the classic work of "Squier and Davis on the Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley." Besides these, General Lytle surveyed "a position of about 100 acres, about 20 miles up the East Fork." The plan of that position was so singular that it has been reprinted in the most elaborate foreign works, among others, in the very expensive Du Paix Collection. What obtained fame among the learned has been ignored and forgotten at home. Inquiry about that position has not been satisfied. If "about 20 miles up" is taken along the banks of the very winding stream, nothing has been lo- cated. But if taken as the roads cross the country, the cir-
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cuitous course of the East Fork presents quite as many miles of equally distant slopes for consideration.
In the absence of other claim, the most probable scene of much lost and otherwise forgotten toil is the once pretty wood- land just above the mouth of Crane Run, locally known as Indian Graves. Up to the enactment of the stock laws after the Civil War, the neighboring herds kept the fenceless grove like a swarded park, which was a trysting place for the fishers and hunters in that direction, and a wooing ground where pic- nic parties warbled life away or gentle footsteps lightly tripped a dance with pleasant hope. But that may not be again until another aeon of change shall have massed the chemical ele- ments to refit the earth for another race, perhaps no more thoughtful of our sort than we have been of others. Ax and fire have overcome the great poplars, beeches and sugars that stood in long lines both curved and straight with a regularity seemingly too cunning for chance.
The plowman has also levelled numerous heaps from which many a load of stone has been wagoned off to make walls and roads for the wanton wasters. Any trace of an enclosure sur- veyed by General Lytle, if this be the place, has been lost in the transformation wrought by the early clearings, but cairns in the more recent hilly grove are a fixed memory with many still living. Whatever was left undone in plundering the graves by the first generation of the irreverent whites was completed by the next, and soon there will be nothing but this mention to memorate the scene. This place has had some local celebrity as the graves of those killed in a battle of or with Indians. The tradition is lacking in fact. The battlefield of Grassy Run is four miles or more farther up the river. Al- though that Indian band was successful in their favorite, pa- triotic and exhilarating pursuit of horse stealing, it is im- possible they returned so far on a dangerous trail loaded with so many dead for such an elaborate burial. The largest num- ber said to be slain in that battle would not account for the burials at Indian Graves, and the mode of burying was not the Shawnee fashion.
· Such durable sepulture indicates a more settled mode of life than was found by the earliest explorers along the Ohio. Topped by the most aged trees, such graves mark an ancient
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occupation down the Miami, along the East Fork and up the Ohio where the valleys of Nine Mile, Twelve Mile, Indian Creek, Bull Skin, White Oak, Straight Creek, Red Oak, Eagle Creek and beyond were the abode of people who covered cribs of wood with mounds or made stone graves if possible, and sometimes both. These graves usually by the brow of far looking hills or sightly knolls were made by setting suitable stone on edge around a space for one or several bodies with bottoms of flagging stone and a stronger covering of wider and longer stone, all sunk more or less and heaped with earth. The heaps sometimes had the appearance of having had a sec- ondarycurbing and even a coping. In noting whence the larger stones had been carried by hand, for other way was none, the performance seems incredible to those who can re- member seventy years ago.
Eastward from the East Fork, enclosures are few and small or blotted out. One near New Richmond is a ditched and walled triangle of about an acre. Perhaps those works were less needful, or maybe the people were not sufficient for such tasks, or they may have been required for duty farther north, where the great forts must have had help from far. Some properly conducted explorations have proved uniquely inter- esting. On July 12-15, 1888, in Jackson township, by the coun- ty line near Marathon, under the personally skillful direction of the noted archaeologist, Prof. Warren K. Moorehead, a trench twenty-five feet wide, and much larger at the center, was cut through a mound seventy-five feet wide, ninety-five feet long, and known at first to be quite twenty feet high, but reduced to eight feet by many plowings. Within ten feet from the center and within seven feet from the surface, large quan- tities of burnt clay mingled with charcoal were found, and then a skull with teeth burnt black. At the center and four feet from the bottom, a well preserved skeleton was found covered with what was thought to have been elm and hickory bark. Beneath this skeleton were three layers of earth, each six inches thick. The upper layer was white, the next sand, and the lower layer was red burnt clay. Below this was an- other skeleton badly charred at the extremities, and surround- ed with black and yellow earth slightly burnt. On the level, seven feet below the surface, a large slab of limestone with
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the imprint of seven ribs had been subjected to intense heat. Snail and mussel shells, deer horns and pottery occurred in fragments.
After a fruitless exploration of two mounds more in that vi- cinity, Prof. Moorehead's party excavated a circular mound in Perry township, near Fayetteville, about one hundred feet in diameter and five feet high, undisturbed in a woods and surrounded with a circle two hundred feet in diameter, with a base of seven feet and about three feet high. Nothing was found except forty-two mica sheets laid in neatly overlapping layers covering about three square feet some ten feet east of center. The use seems to have been purely ceremonial. The party then undertook a mound seventy feet long and sixty-five feet wide that once stood nearly twenty-five feet high, with a corresponding circle, near St. Martins in the same township. Two skeletons were found whose skulls indicated death in battle. One skull was faced with a sheet or plate of copper five by seven inches stone, hammered cold from the ore, with two perforations to fit the eyes. Close by on a three-inch layer of earth burned hard as brick was another skeleton with a battle broken skull. The same party then dug through a group of seven mounds about thirty feet in diameter and hav- ing an average distance apart of one hundred feet along the front of the hills facing the East Fork, nearly two miles below Marathon. These mounds were each composed of both earth and stone and all belonged to the burial class.
Such are the memorials of the people that once hunted and fished and made merry along, but knew nothing of, the line common to the counties of Brown and Clermont. While what was so frequent on the west side has been so ruthlessly wasted the less common remains on the east side have been better preserved. If Brown county has few enclosures to re- member, several mounds remain to be cherished. This is not- ably so of the Ripley mounds which, and all that are any- where, will be kept for centuries-if the owners stay wise. For, until man ceases to ask his origin or to question his des- tiny, the mystery of the Mound Builders will have peculiar fascination, and refinement will regret that so much of their strangely beautiful work has been destroyed. Yet, with what might have been learned from careful study of the scattered
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or demolished and forever lost relics of Old Clermont, we could have only slight assurance about the social scheme re- sulting in such productions. For larger opinion holds the en- closures to be probable sanctuaries and possible retreats, and the mounds to be voluntary or prescribed tributes to petty greatness; and no view includes the mothers and children, or the pain and sorrow of the common lot. Who so would know something of this must revisit the tepee villages "down in the valley which was full of bones," and there give heed, while conquering Science armed with charted scrolls and magic glasses bids the "very dry" bones to declare a tale that makes the antique world seem never before so dark.
In reviewing the hope or failure, the pride or shame, the ecstacy or weariness, of an ended life, we are apt to think the grave covers all. And so it was with the earth protected spaces between the moldered logs or crumbling stone through the four hundred certain years since Columbus, and, through how much longer before, any can guess but none can tell. A comparison of many investigations shows that the custom, purpose, progress-in a word-the culture-of a people throughout Southern Ohio, West Virginia, Central Kentucky, and on into Tennessee was contemporaneous in respects too frequent to be accidental. This people seems to have been numerous enough for self-protecting against a probable foe. But when the sheetless dead are called from the midst of val- leys full of bones, it is found that three-fifths of the born died under the age of sixteen and three-fourths of these children did not live to be six years old. More than half of those surviving childhood did not reach thirty years, and hardly one in a hun- dred passed the age of fifty. To make the tabulation still more terrible, one-sixth of the skeletons, on various diseased bones, have brought, through all the hundreds of burying years, the ineffaceable lesions of a horrible infection which, in the innocence of their ignorance must have seemed the scourge of all their gods. With constructive imagination for linking historic suggestion between an imperative cause and an inevitable result, this shocking revelation supplies enough reason for the utter displacement of the ruined and ruining race. Burdened with unutterable weakness, for which they could neither plant nor hunt because of incessant raids, the
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strong men worn few ceased from the staggering strife. Thus, they fell at last, not for a fault done by them, but because of a far away ancestral share in harm that set the children's teeth on edge.
Compared with other events in the drama of man, the scene most replete with interest for a benevolent mind is the con- flict for freedom in America. As in the progress of the fossil world so in man's culminating struggle, there has been a place for all, and nothing useless. The mythic Mound Builders played an early and a leading part on the ever tragic stage, where the fittest is to survive. After more pondering than may seem profitable, and though many may deride an opinion more easily doubted than refuted, as an inference both reason- able and suffcient, I venture this conclusion.
The Southern or Toltecan or Mexican Indians of Asiatic origin coming early and ever seeking an easier life in more fruitful climes, found and with long cultivation domesticated the tropical corn plant upon which they grew numerous and ceased to be nomads. But, then as now, when people came to be many and game scarce, band after band impelled by need or lured by traveler's tales, turned back to northern plains teem- ing with game, nowhere, by all after accounts, so fine and so plentiful as that which grazed the blue grass of the Silurian Island. The bands trailing back to the north only took the skill of their day, and, hidden in the lodges of the wilderness, never learned the larger art of their race in Mexico, that after- ward caused the conquering Spaniard to become a fiend of avarice. With the humble skill of the Stone Age and a strange taste in heaping curious forms of earth, they also brought their tropic corn and made it to be all but native along the Ohio. Waxing rich in what was taken with toil they became the envied prey of the tribes gathering in and burst- ing from the north. Then the mighty forts were arched about the northern part of the Blue Limestone, in front of their choicest and most endangered land, both to guard their homes and save their templed groves and mounded graves. In spite of all that, the fierce northman from beyond the Lakes enacted the Fall of Rome along the Ohio and wrested its rule from care encumbered men who trusted in vows and walls instead of shorter spears.
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STONE ARROW POINTS, SPEAR HEADS, KNIVES, AWLS AND DRILLS.
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If this be true, and nothing proposed seems more likely, then the memory of the much suffering and sad fated planters and fort makers is redeemed from the reproach of wasted effort. For their golden gift, their brave bequest, the proudest plant, the goodliest grain of the New World, the kingly corn, easy and quick to raise, and also easy and long to keep, has done more than its kings to prosper the world.
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