The state of Ohio boasts some of the most astounding ancient earthworks in the world, which, before the era of pioneer destruction, included more than 10,000 burial mounds, elaborate sets of parallel embankments that together extended at least a hundred miles, effigy mounds like the famous Serpent Mound of Adams County, and enormous precise geometric earthworks in the shapes of circles, squares, ellipses, and octagons that seem like beacons to the heavens.
Indeed, the first white settlers in Ohio believed that they had come upon the ruins of a bygone lost civilization. While staying in Chillicothe, the first state capital and where some of the most extraordinary of the earthworks reside, the painter Thomas Cole wrote in 1836:
“[H]e who stands on the mounds of the West [Ohio was then the West], the most venerable remains of American antiquity, may experience the emotion of the sublime, but it is the sublimity of a shoreless ocean un-islanded by the recorded deeds of man.”