Marietta, Ohio
Journal Entry
April 19, 2014
Death is a debt, to nature due, Which I have paid, and so must you.
—Epitaph commonly encountered on gravestones in New England, dating to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
Death is the great equalizer, isn’t it? Our religion, our ethnicity, our gender—all the characteristics we use to define our true selves—pale in the face of the certainty of our own mortality. There’s no more visceral reminder of this than what is experienced when walking through an old graveyard. Stop and read the epitaphs on the stones. Among them you will find the brief and often poignant biographies of people long gone.
My visit to a cemetery in Marietta, Ohio, during a recent leg of my archaeological odyssey was filled with such reminders of lives long since passed. As we walked among the gravestones, the people buried beneath our feet were no longer merely anonymous historical figures but real people, whose loved ones grieved their deaths as they laid them to rest in this place of silent and serene beauty. For example, there was George Smith, who was born in England, lived in Troy, New York, and died unexpectedly in 1832 at the age of 54 while on a visit to Marietta. Then there were the two very young sons of Thomas and Sarah Flagg, placed under a single stone though they died more than ten years apart. Luther was barely two months old when he died in 1837; his brother, Uranius, was only a year and a half upon his death ten years later. As a parent myself, I can scarcely imagine the despair experienced by those boys’ parents.
Why did we stop at a nineteenth-century graveyard in our archaeological odyssey? We did so because in its midst is a towering monument to death and mortality made by a people from another time. That monument is today called Cemetery Mound, a 30-foot-high sepulcher built by Ohio’s native people some 2,000 years before the establishment of the nineteenth-century cemetery that now surrounds it.
What You Will See
Cemetery Mound (historically called the “Conus”) is not the largest burial mound we will see in our fifty-site odyssey, but its context in the middle of a graveyard may be the most compelling (Figure 44). The graveyard is called, appropriately, Mound Cemetery and is surrounded by a middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes in an old industrial city in eastern Ohio. Imagine living in a bustling city on a street abutting a cemetery within which is an enormous, 2,000-year-old burial mound visible from your front porch. I think that would be pretty cool, actually, but that’s just me. We parked in front of one of those houses, crossed the street, and spent nearly 2 hours walking the grounds, reading gravestones, climbing the mound (there are stairs), and immersing ourselves in the lives and deaths of the denizens of nineteenth-century Marietta. I am one of those strange people who find old cemeteries enormously interesting, so Mound Cemetery was a twofer for me: an ancient burial mound and a bunch of old gravestones (I.7).
At about 30 feet, Cemetery Mound is a bit less than half the height of Site 17, Miamisburg (Ohio) or Site 21, Grave Creek (West Virginia), other conical mounds included in my odyssey. It is, nevertheless, quite impressive. With a diameter of 150 feet at its base, its construction required digging, moving, and piling up more than 175,000 cubic feet of earth. That’s a lot of dirt. Additionally, the builders of the mound excavated a shallow trench, completely encircling it. The soil from that trench was piled along its exterior, creating a circular ridge also circumscribing the primary earthwork. The mound and encircling trench and ridge together give the appearance of a quite beautiful and monumental sculpture made of soil, the kind of public artwork you might encounter in an elaborate garden or on a college campus. The burial mound appears to be affiliated with the Adena Culture and is at least 2,000 years old, though additional earthworks in the area likely were produced by the later Hopewell Culture. Very little archaeological research has been conducted at the site. There’s no Mound Cemetery museum, so you won’t be able to see artifacts recovered there. Nevertheless, it is a beautiful and singular place and certainly worth a visit.
The Conus was originally part of an elaborate series of earthworks in the area, including a square enclosure of 27 acres demarcated by linear mounds and another rectangular enclosure of 50 acres, inside of which were three small platform mounds. Two of the platform mounds still exist. One has the local library built on top; the other is the centerpiece of a town park.
The Marietta earthworks mark what may have been the first attempt in the United States to determine the age of an archaeological site by using tree rings. In 1788 a local reverend, Manasseh Cutler, counted more than 400 annual growth rings in the oldest trees being cut down from the tops of Marietta’s mounds and suggested that those earthworks must, therefore, be at least 400 years old. Obviously the trees couldn’t have started growing on the mounds until those mounds had been constructed. That was pretty sophisticated thinking for the time.
Why Is Cemetery Mound Important?
The town of Marietta, Ohio, was founded in 1788 following the establishment by the federal government of a region called “the Northwest Territories.” Yup; in the eighteenth century, Ohio was considered to be the American northwestern frontier. Go figure. There was a bit of a land rush by folks living in New England for the wide open spaces of Ohio. In fact, some of Marietta’s original settlers were Revolutionary War veterans from southern New England.
After a brief sounding of the mound by these first settlers and the realization that it contained at least one human interment, the remarkable for the time decision was made to preserve the site and, at the same time, establish a cemetery in the area surrounding it. That decision has produced quite a remarkable scene; today, hundreds of beautiful and sometimes elaborately carved nineteenth-century gravestones envelop a largely intact burial mound built two millennia before the first of those stones was set in place.
Mound Cemetery is a very nice example of what historic preservationists call “adaptive reuse.” Throughout much of the Southeast and Midwest, many European settlers viewed ancient earthworks as inconveniences and impediments, destroying them in great numbers to prepare land for agriculture or development. It is very impressive and especially fortunate that in 1801 the founders of Marietta made the remarkably thoughtful and sensitive decision to continue the native precedent, treating the area around the mound as sacred ground and continuing its use as a home for the dead.
Site Type: Burial Mound
Wow Factor: *** The overall appearance of the site is very cool, with a large burial mound surrounded by nineteenth-century gravestones.
Museum: None
Ease of Road Access: ****
Ease of Hike: ****
Natural Beauty of Surroundings: *** Old cemeteries are beautiful. This one, with an ancient burial mound in the middle, is amazing to see.
Kid Friendly: * If your kids like spooky, they will enjoy walking (respectfully) through the cemetery and reading some of the epitaphs.
Food: Bring your own.
How to Get There: Mound Cemetery is located in the middle of a residential neighborhood in Marietta, Ohio. Punch Fifth and Scammel Streets, Marietta, Ohio, into your GPS, or type that into whatever mapping program you prefer for exact directions. There’s no parking lot, but you should be able to find parking on local streets.
Hours of Operation: The gates to the cemetery are open during daylight hours. There are a few entrances on the streets surrounding the cemetery.
Cost: Free
Best Season to Visit: Any time
Website: www.mariettaoh.net/site_pages/government/monuments/Mounds_of_Marietta.pdf
Designation: Cemetery; National Register of Historic Places