Seip Mound is visible to the south of Route 50, east of Bainbridge, Ohio, in the Paint Creek valley. It is 30 feet high, or roughly the height of a three-story building. At its base, It is 240 feet long — almost the length of a football field — and 160 feet wide.
The mound stands on a site occupied in the past by the people of the Hopewell Culture, which flourished 1,500 to 2,000 years ago. It is a burial mound, built up in in size over time.
The Hopewell Culture was centered in today’s Ohio, and its people lived in small communities scattered across hundreds of square miles. Other ceremonial mounds are found at the sites of these communities, including at the Hopewell Culture National Historical Park in Chillicothe, Ohio, to the east on Route 50.
We don’t know what the Hopewell people actually called themselves. The name we use today is derived from an archeological dig in Chillicothe. When that site was first excavated in the early 1890s, it was on the farm of a Civil War veteran named Mordecai C. Hopewell.
Hopewell communities have been found along rivers, and those rivers connected a trading network of surprising size. For example, when traveling east to west along Route 50, you enter Hopewell Culture lands in today’s West Virginia, roughly 300 miles east of Seip Mound, and continue in Hopewell lands until you reach Emporia, Kansas, approximately 800 miles west. That adds up to almost 1,100 miles, a long distance even traveling by car. It is quite remarkable, considering the fastest transportation available to the Hopewell was on the water, using paddles. Hopewell trading connections also extended north past the Great Lakes and into Canada, and south to areas such as today’s New Orleans and Florida.
Artifacts found at Seip Mound and other sites reveal the trading range of the Hopewell Culture. Some of these artifacts, such as those made of obsidian, mica, and copper, came to Ohio from distant locales. The falcon pictured below is from a site in the Hopewell Culture National Historical Park. It was hammered out of copper, which is found near the Great Lakes, and not in central Ohio.
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Photo of Seip Mound by the author.
The ph0t0 0f the copper falcon is from the National Park Service.