Mound Builders in Wood County, Ohio
The Story of the Maumee, 1929
Wood County had a few scattering prehistoric sites mostly along the Maumee. Mill's archaeological atlas marks an enclosure in the extreme northern border of the county on the riverbank below the Ford Plate Glass works, Rossford. Most reliably generally, it is possible that this was not an enclosure as Mill's states, but a more than ordinary burial mound. Civilization long ago destroyed its identity.
The Maumee River Basin, 1905
Three semi-circular ridges of earth were found along the lower Maumee River. The first was observed between the years 1837 to 1946 and the book (Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, by E. George Squir and Dr. E.H. Davis, Washington 1848) from which the accompanying engraving is made, was published in 1848 as the first volume of the Smithsonian Contributions to knowledge. The description given at that time read that:
This is one of the earthworks that were all the same size and shape along the Maumee River. One of these earthworks can still be seen up the river at Fort Wayne, Indiana. For over 100 burial mound and earthwork sites in Ohio with photos of each and direction, click the link. Over 222 burial mounds and earthworks in Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky and Michigan.
This work is situated on the right bank of the Maumee River, two miles above Toledo, in Wood County, Ohio. The water of the river here is deep and still, and at the lake level; the bluff is about thirty-five feet high. Since the work was built, the current has undermined a portion, and parts of the embankment are to be seen on slips, a, a. The country for miles in all directions is flat and wet, and is heavily timbered, as is the space in and around this enclosure. The walls measuring from the bottoms of the ditches are from three to four feet high. They are not of uniform dimensions throughout their extent; and as there is no ditch elsewhere, it is presumable that the work was abandoned before it was finished. Nothing can be plainer that most of the remains in northern Ohio are military works. There have not yet been found any remnants of the timber in the walls, yet it is very safe to presume that palisades ewer planted on them, and that wood posts and gates ever erected at the passages left in the embankments and ditches. All the positions are contiguous to water; and there is no higher land in their vicinity from which they might in any degree be commanded. Of the work’s bordering the on the shore of Lake Erie. Through the State of Oho, there are none but may have been intended for defense, although in some of them the design is not perfectly manifest. They form a line from Connecticut to Toledo, at a distance from three to five miles from the lake, and all stand upon or near the principal rivers . . . The most natural inference with respect to the northern Cordon of works is, that they formed a well-occupied line, constructed either to protect the advance of a nation landing from the lake and moving southward for conquest; or a line of resistance for people inhabiting these shores and pressed upon by their southern neighbors. The scarcity of mounds, the absence of pyramids of earth, which are so common the Ohio River, the want of rectangular or any other regular works at the north-- all these differences tend to the conclusion that the northern part of Ohio was inhabited by a distinct people.
