Chillicothe: Capital Twice Over

The name comes from the Shawnee: Chalahgawtha, the name of one of their principal towns, a word that translates roughly as principal place. For the Shawnee, Chillicothe was not just a location but a function: wherever the Chillicothe division of the tribe settled, that place became Chillicothe. There were at least five Chiallicothes across the Ohio country over the eighteenth century, as the Shawnee moved their towns in response to war and pressure. The city that stands here today, on the Scioto River in the Paint Creek valley, descends from the final, Euro-American appropriation of that name.

Anglo-American settlement began here in the seventeen nineties. Nathaniel Massie, a Virginia surveyor who had been laying out claims in the Virginia Military District, platted a town in seventeen ninety-six on the east bank of the Scioto. Within a few years it was the largest town in the Ohio country.

Chillicothe became the capital of the Northwest Territory in eighteen hundred, when Indiana Territory was separated from the larger territory. When Ohio wrote its first state constitution and achieved statehood on March first, eighteen oh three, it was here. The constitutional convention met in Chillicothe, and the new state government convened here. Chillicothe held that distinction as Ohio's capital until eighteen ten, when the capital moved to Zanesville for two years, then back to Chillicothe for four more years, before finally settling permanently in Columbus in eighteen sixteen.

The Hopewell earthwork tradition that flourished two thousand years ago left its most spectacular monuments in this valley. Mound City, now the centerpiece of Hopewell Culture National Historical Park just north of town, holds twenty-three mounds within a square embankment. The objects recovered from these mounds, copper antler headdresses, mica cutouts of bird claws and human hands, obsidian blades from Wyoming volcanoes, represent one of the richest concentrations of ancient American artistry ever excavated from a single site. Chillicothe is, in the deepest sense, exactly what the Shawnee word implies: a principal place.