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.
From 1926 to 1950, Route 50 crossed a covered bridge near Medora, Indiana. Though 50 has been re-routed, the bridge still stands. To see it, turn south from Route 50 on Indiana 235. In three miles you’ll reach Medora, a town of around 800 people.
From Medora, follow 235 east for one mile to the East Fork of the White River and the Medora covered bridge.
Covered bridges were first built in the U.S. in the early 19th century. Regarded as engineering marvels, they attracted the attention of travelers from Europe, including Charles Dickens. Dickens wrote about one in 1842 in his American Notes, “We crossed the river by a wooden bridge, roofed and covered on all sides, and nearly a mile in length. It was profoundly dark, perplexed with great beams crossing and recrossing it at every possible angle . . . and I held my head down to save my head from the rafters above . . . and said to myself this cannot be reality.”
Construction of early covered bridges supported economic growth. They eliminated the need to ford rivers, and so made it easier for farmers to get grain and cattle to market. They also improved travel by foot or horse and buggy.
Local builders with experience building ships and barns constructed the bridges using the timber which was abundant in eastern North America. They covered the bridges to protect them from weather damage, because it was easier to replace degraded roofs and walls than to rebuild damaged structural elements. Windows added complexity to construction and were regarded as extras. The Medora bridge was once called “the dark bridge,” because it had no windows and its length made it particularly dark in the middle.
The walls of a covered bridge conceal how it’s built, but photos here, taken during renovation in 2010, show the Medora bridge’s structure. The wooden triangles in the sides of the bridge are trusses, a simple, economical, but strong form.
The curved wooden arches used in the Medora bridge are called Burr arches, first used in 1804 by Theodore Burr, an inventor from Connecticut. They were an important improvement in bridge technology because they increased strength while keeping the bridge deck level. Burr arches also allowed longer bridge spans, making it possible to cross wider rivers.
At 460 feet, the Medora bridge is the longest covered bridge in Indiana. In the bridge’s application for recognition on the National Register of Historic Places, run by the National Park Service, it was called “the longest surviving historic covered bridge in the United States.” The American Society of Civil Engineers recognizes it as the “longest remaining nineteenth century covered bridge structure in the United States.” It should be said, however, that an Internet search for “longest covered bridge” reveals a number of claimants for this honor.
The first covered bridge in the United States was built over the Schuykill River near Philadelphia in 1805, and the first Indiana covered bridge was built near Indianapolis in 1835.
Joseph J. Daniels built the Medora bridge in 1875. It took nine months, cost $18,142, and opened on July 15.
Information such as this is tracked by the National Society for the Preservation of Covered Bridges, which assigns an identifying number to each bridge in its World Guide to Covered Bridges. The Medora bridge is number 14-36-04.
The exact number of covered bridges built in the U.S. is not known, but there may have been as many as 10,000, including 400 to 500 in Indiana. Today, there are around 800 U.S. covered bridges remaining, and fewer than 100 in Indiana. According to the Smithsonian Institution, an average of five covered bridges are damaged or destroyed each year, and according to the Indiana Historical Bureau, a key factor is “careless driving.”
The Medora bridge carried automobile traffic until 1970. In June 2011, a rehab of the bridge was completed, and it is now open for pedestrian and bicycle traffic.
For many small communities, covered bridges provided the largest near-by covered space, and they were used for revival meetings, weddings, and political rallies. The town of Medora continued this practice when, on August 3, 2013, at 6:30 PM, it held a dinner party on its renewed bridge. More than one hundred fifty guests dined on fried chicken, ham, scalloped potatoes, green beans, grape salad, hot rolls, home-made pie, iced tea, and lemonade.
The Medora bridge has a website, http://www.medoracoveredbridge.org. Go there to learn more, see photos of the renovated bridge, and perhaps make reservations for a future dinner.
The Medora covered bridge, crossing the East Fork of the White River.
It’s 272 miles on Route 50 between Missouri’s two major metropolitan centers, St. Louis and Kansas City. In the middle of the state, Route 50 passes through the state capitol, Jefferson City, where some fractious history took place.
In 1820 Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, in tandem with Maine, a free state. This was the “Missouri Compromise,” which sought to keep a balance between slave and free states in the U.S. Congress. The compromise satisfied few, and by 1861 Missouri was claimed not only by the government of the United States, but also by the Confederate States of America, which was made up of states that had seceded from the union.
The start of the Civil War increased the urgency of both claims, and Missouri, unclear itself on what it should do, sent delegations to the congresses of both the Union and the Confederacy.
Meanwhile, there were weapons and other military supplies stored in St. Louis, at the St. Louis Arsenal. An organization of Confederate sympathizers, called the St. Louis Minute Men, coveted the weapons. A similar group of Union sympathizers, called the Wide Awakes, opposed the Minute Men. The legal and political wrangling over the arsenal included a variety of insults, such as “wicked minions” and “unconstitutional edicts of the military despotism.” Eventually, the Union sympathizers prevailed in St. Louis, but 125 miles away, Confederate supporters controlled the state capitol in Jefferson City.
The Wide Awakes were inducted into the Union army, joining troops led by Nathaniel Lyon, a fiery pro-Union officer. Lyon marched his troops on Jefferson City, forcing the Confederacy-aligned Missouri government to flee first to Boonville and then to Neosho, both towns in Missouri. In Neosho, the government passed an ordinance of secession, proclaiming that Missouri had joined the Confederacy. At the time, the legitimacy of this attempted departure from the Union was called into question (as it still is today by historians) due to a most prosaic question: Did the secessionist government in Neosho have a quorum?
Meanwhile, supported by Nathaniel Lyon’s troops, a provisional government favoring the Union took power in Jefferson City, giving Missouri two dueling governments. Ultimately, the Confederacy proved unable to control the state, and the secessionist government was driven into exile. It “governed” from Arkansas and then from Marshall, Texas, until the end of the war.
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Was Nathanial Lyon really “fiery,” as I asserted above? Let him speak for himself, as he did to the Confederate state officials in Jefferson City:
“Rather than concede to the State of Missouri the right to demand that my government shall not enlist troops within her limits, or bring troops into the State whenever it pleases, or move troops at its own will into, out of, or through the State; rather than concede to the State of Missouri for one single instant the right to dictate to my government in any matter, however unimportant, I would [pointing at the state officials] see you, and you, and you, and you and every man, woman and child in the State, dead and buried. This means war. In an hour one of my officers will call for you and conduct you out of my lines.”
— Nathaniel Lyon to the governor of Missouri and his staff
