Hopewell earthworks site in Butler County still a mystery. Tours could offer answers.

Fortified Hill is a hilltop enclosure earthwork built by Indigenous people thousands of years ago in what is now Ross Township, Butler County.

Soon, the public will have the opportunity to experience the architectural genius of the Hopewell culture through limited 90-minute tours.

“There's a lot of mystery around it, but we definitely want to bring the people out to appreciate the past that's right here in our area," said Stephen Smith, associate director of education and programming at Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park.

The tours are offered through the adjacent Pyramid Hill park. They’re starting this weekend and will be offered on a monthly basis through November.

A monumental site that’s weathered many changes

Fortified Hill is 40 acres, according to park officials. It was once at risk of development when the property went up for public auction in 2019. But it was saved after the Harry T. Wilks Family Foundation acquired the property and gifted it to the park.

It’s taken six years for the site to be restored, said Pyramid Hill’s executive director Sarah Templeton Wilson.

Courtesy of Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park

“During that time period, we were still working with community partners, we're still inviting in experts but we wanted to make sure we did this right because unfortunately there's been so many people that have done it wrong over the years and a lot of times we're dealing with past choices on other properties,” Templeton Wilson said. “So we want to learn from those choices and make sure we made ours to the best of our abilities.”

Jeff Leipzig, a nearby resident of the site, was the one that first made calls to try to find an organization to maintain the site.

“It kind of sat quietly, for many, many years. And if we wouldn't have been able to gather the people to preserve it and save it, it probably could have just been lost to existence,” Leipzig said.

A portion of the earthworks’ walls may have been destroyed by farming and tilling, said Leipzig.

Remaining proof of Hopewell culture

These were built by peoples from the Hopewell culture an estimated 1,600 to 2,000 years ago. Archaeologists believe the earthworks and its featured mounds were used for ceremonies and burials.

“They're the best physical representation of indigenous presence that we have in Ohio. If you say, ‘well, Indians weren't here,’ I’d say, ‘look at these,’” said Cincinnati Museum Center archeological curator Bob Genheimer.

Eight other earthworks in the state, known as the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, make up one of the newest sites in the United States to receive UNESCO World Heritage Site designation. Fortified Hill could have been a part of that list, but it had not yet been saved by the time of the application.

There’s still a lot that archaeologists don’t know about the site such as the reason for its location, why it has some of its features, and what the shape represents.

But Genheimer said it's almost shaped like a spine back.

“If we look down here, it's tall in the center, (in) this big open sacred area in the center, and the walls sort of gently drift down to the embankment walls…so it's sort of like walking on top of a turtle shell,” Genheimer said.

People don’t walk on the walls of the earthworks – visitors will walk within them.

Adriana Martinez-Smiley

While they invite professional research on the site, they won’t allow any destructive archaeological work on the property.

“We are intentionally not doing that. We have no plans to do that because … there's been some destructive amateur archeology in the past. So we're using modern science to do archeological research in the future that will still help to start to tell us the story,” Templeton Wilson said.

Opportunity to behold its “specialness”

The tours will be led by trained volunteers and docents. The tour itself may not be accessible to some because they’re unable to change the terrain too much, said Smith.

“There's some natural accessibility barriers here because it is a natural walking path so we make sure to advertise that we are a mild to moderate hike,” he said.

But Pyramid Hill does have an exhibit inside of the park’s museum which features information and some history of the earthworks, as well as some visuals.

Park staff said tribal representatives from the Shawnee Tribe, Delaware Tribe of Indians, Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, and Wyandotte Nation were consulted for site preservation and tour development. They are some of the likely descendants of the Hopewell culture.

Templeton Wilson said they hope to expand the tours in the future, but their first goal is to preserve the site.

“We're making sure that we are doing it in a very respectful way so that people really can understand the specialness of it and we're also making sure that we're not doing any damage to the site,” she said.