Dispatches From the Parks: Hopewell Culture National Historical Park
While crystal clear rivers and sprawling mountainscapes are probably some of the first things that come to your mind when you hear of the National Park Service, many of the parks that the Service protects are parks that have had to reclaim their natural state. A great case of this is Hopewell Culture National Historical Park. Hopewell Culture was established in 1923 and was created to preserve the surviving earthworks of the Hopewell people. The Hopewell people built numerous earthworks that were large and designed with an unexpected sense of mathematics. However, farming practices and military industrialization destroyed most of these structures, which covered most of Ohio and a few other places in the eastern United States in the early 20th century. In the present day, the National Park Service has worked hard to scientifically detail the surviving structures and physically replicate destroyed structures for the public to visit.
My first impression of the park was that so much of it is set up right on top of civilization. So many times you are walking in the park and can see schools, mines or other businesses set up right next to you. The park does a great job of explaining the history of why this is the case, but it’s still an odd sight. The visitor center for the park is kind of small, and the park video on display there is kind of vague (and understandably so as we still know so little about the Hopewell people and so much of the park was in poor condition when the NPS got their hands on it), which makes for a bit of a disappointing first impression. However, take a step outside the visitor center’s backdoor and your time at the park will get much more interesting. Right outside of the visitor center is the Mound City Group, which is the most intact and only fully reconstructed Hopewell site anywhere. I quickly got a sense of wonder upon witnessing how high some of these mounds got up.
The park is composed of six units, all of them preserving a different Hopewell structure. I didn’t have much time to spend at the park and wanted to get a hike in. So after leaving the Mound City Group district of the park, I headed for the Seip Earthworks district. The Seip Earthworks district is one of the more isolated districts in the park. It’s only about a twenty minute drive from the visitor center at Mound City Group, and once again, civilization seems to be built right on top of this site. In fact, there were portions of my hike that I was worried I wandered into someone’s backyard. That being said I was able to disconnect a bit more at this district as there are many waysides featuring fantastic artwork (including native artifacts and present day ideas) along the hike and it all leads to Paint Creek. Here, was the only place in the park that I witnessed what felt like the wilderness that was present here in the time of the Hopewell people. I was even able to witness a kestrel landing on one of the few trees in the area. Along the way through the trail you get a sense of how intricately designed some of these structures are.
While in Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, it’s hard not to notice the weird mix of present day civilization with the preservation of a time forgotten. Look, listen and feel hard enough and you may be able to just imagine what it was like when the Hopewell ruled this area.
