U.S. Highway 50

Ohio — Seip Mound and the Hopewell Culture

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.

Hillsboro, Ohio, and the World’s Largest Horseshoe Crab

Follow Ohio Route 124 east out of Hillsboro for about a mile, and you’ll arrive at the World’s Largest Horseshoe Crab.

At 68 feet long and 28 feet wide, it’s big enough to house meetings and weddings, which it did in an earlier incarnation as an attraction at the Freedom Worship Baptist Church in Blanchester, Ohio. It was there that a person named Gene Sullivan jumped over it on his motorcycle, as part of a religious promotion called “Jump for Jesus.”

In 2015, a person named Ben Sexton bought it, cut it up with a chainsaw, and reassembled it in Hillsboro, 25 miles east of Blanchester.

It’s worth noting that HIllsboro’s concerns extend beyond crabs:

Photos by the author.

Williamsburg, Ohio — The Hartman Log Cabin

The Hartman Log Cabin is on Route 50 in Williamsburg, Ohio. Members of the Hartman family built it in 1838, after they emigrated from Germany in the 1750s and moved to what is now Ohio in 1801.

Constructing a house of logs was not a new idea in the 1830s. It is thought that the first log cabins in North America were built by Swedish immigrants, who settled in the Delaware River Valley in the 1630s. Those folks brought log construction expertise with them from Scandinavia, where cabins made of logs had been built since medieval times. Cruder log structures were used there as far back as the Bronze Age (3,500 B.C.).

People generally built log cabins where suitable timber (tall, straight, and relatively knot-free) grew nearby. The length of the largest available logs often determined the building’s dimensions, and this can be seen in the longest logs on the front of the Hartman cabin.

The flat fronts of those logs show they had been shaped, or hewn, before construction, resulting in a relatively smooth building exterior. In contrast, early log cabins were often built of unshaped logs. This took less work, but round logs were harder to seal against the weather. To fill the gaps between the logs in early cabins, builders used whatever came to hand — materials such as mud, small stones, sticks, and even corncobs.

The Hartman cabin’s logs are notched at the ends, so they fit together at the corners to stabilize the structure. Why not use nails? Because log cabins settle and compress over time, and nails pull out.

The Hartman cabin also has a stone foundation, which means it had an actual floor inside when it was built. Cabins without foundations had only earth floors and were often temporary shelters, to be lived in while more permanent housing was built. They were then converted to barns or used for storage.

Log cabins have developed a mythic reputation in the U.S., maybe because seven presidents were born or lived in them — plus one who made the claim. The ones who did: Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, and James A. Garfield. The one who didn’t: William Henry Harrison, who wanted to be known as a man of the people, but who actually lived on an estate in Vincennes, Indiana, called Grouseland.

Log homes are still built today, using kits of pre-cut logs, and can reach 3,000 square feet or more in size. They are considered sustainable, and thus part of a “green” approach to living.

The Hartman Log Cabin continues to be used. The local county renovated it and rents it out for weddings, parties, and reunions. Other public log buildings include some U.S. National Park lodges, which are quite large.

So, what’s the world’s largest log cabin? It’s the Château Montebello Hotel, in Montebello, Quebec, built in 1930.

Photos of the Hartman Cabin by the author.

The photo of the Château Montebello Hotel is from Wikimedia Commons and is in the public domain. It was orginially on a postcard.

Cincinnati, Ohio

Route 50 passes through the center of downtown Cincinnati, next to the Ohio River. Kentucky is across the river, just to the south.

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Photos by the author.

Cincinnati, Ohio — Cincinnati Chili

Skyline Chili is the largest chain of Cincinnati “chili parlors.” This branch is on Route 50, east of downtown Cincinnati. The Smithsonian calls Cincinnati chili one of the “20 most iconic foods in America.”

If you plan to stop, save some room in your tummy:

This is a “five-way,” as served at Skyline Chili. A five-way includes chili, spaghetti, beans, onions, and cheese. Note that this is a “regular” serving, which means that there is a larger portion available for those of you who are really hungry.

The “chili” part is not really chili as it is known in the rest of the country, but instead a Mediterranean-style meat sauce that contains a hint of cinnamon.

Do Cincinnatians really like this dish? Apparently so, since every year they consume over two million pounds of the meat sauce and one million pounds of the cheese that tops it.

It’s interesting that the dominant chili parlor chains do not serve alcoholic beverages such as beer, which could be an ideal accompaniment for this dish. As a result, the glass you see in the picture contains iced tea.

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Photos by the author.

Newport and Covington, Kentucky

Newport and Covington are Kentucky towns across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, Ohio. In the past, they have not done as well economically as Cincinnati, but their fortunes seem to be improving. The photo above shows an interesting building on the Kentucky side of the river.

There is a pedestrian bridge across the river between Cincinnati and Newport, and Newport has established itself as a center for dining, movies, and other entertainment.

In 1860, the Newport building shown below was the birthplace of General John T. Thompson, who invented the Thompson submachine gun, better known as the Tommy gun. Gen. Thompson died in 1940, dismayed that the Tommy gun had become a gangster weapon of choice.

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Photos by the author.

Cincinnati, Ohio — The Anderson Ferry

The Anderson Ferry has been taking folks across the Ohio River between Ohio and Kentucky since 1817. It is ten miles west of downtown Cincinnati and just fifty yards or so south of Route 50.

The ride across the river takes about fifteen minutes and cost just $5.00 per car, when the photo was taken. No credit cards accepted.

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Photo by the author.

Route 50 in Indiana

There are 169 miles of Route 50 in Indiana, from the outskirts of Cincinnati on the east to Vincennes and the Wabash River, at the border of Illinois on the west.

A closer look at the building above:

In Butlerville, Indiana:

The gas station and convenience store shown below is on Route 50 in Brownstown, Indiana. At this store, as at other similar stores in the state, you are prohibited from buying more than 50 cans of smokeless tobacco in a single day.

Photos by the author.

Map generated by Google Maps.

Lawrenceburg, Indiana

Lawrenceburg is a town of about 5,000 people on Route 50, next to the Ohio River in eastern Indiana.

The levee gate at the end of Walnut Street

The river is on the other side of the levee shown in the photo above. The gate in the center can be closed to protect against floods.

Turn around, and you might see a train passing through town:

The Lawrenceburg police are in control:

Lawrenceburg was the birthplace of James B. Eads, whom you can learn more about in the piece on the St. Louis riverfront. Lawrenceburg honored him by naming Route 50 through Lawrenceburg the Eads Parkway.

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Photos by the author.

North Vernon, Indiana — The Improved Order of Red Men

This building, fronting on Route 50 in the center of North Vernon, was once a lodge of the Improved Order of Red Men, a fraternal order with chapters in many American states.

How many chapters? Where located? How governed? Etc?

All this is covered in excruciating detail in the 623 pages of the Official History of the Improved Order of Red Men, Lindsay, Conley, and Litchman, Fraternity Publishing Company, 1893.

It’s free to read online. If you’re interested, search for it.

Nothing more need be said here.

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Photo by the author.