Miamisburg: The Town That Saved Its Mound
Near Dayton, Ohio
Most of Ohio's ancient earthworks were plowed under in the nineteenth century. Miamisburg kept its mound. Rising sixty-five feet above the Miami River plain, the Miamisburg Mound is one of the two largest conical burial mounds in North America, containing some fifty-four thousand cubic yards of earth piled by the Adena people between eight hundred BCE and one hundred CE. Excavations in eighteen sixty-nine found evidence of construction in multiple stages, generations of a civilization piling earth over their dead across more than nine centuries.
The town of Miamisburg was laid out in eighteen eighteen by four men from Pennsylvania who sold ninety lots along the riverbank and named their settlement for the Miami people who had lived here before them. What makes the local story unusual is that the founding Treon family protected the mound when everyone around them was leveling earthworks for farmland. In nineteen twenty, descendants sold it to Dayton industrialist Charles Kettering, who donated the mound and thirty-seven surrounding acres to the state historical society. You can climb the mound today on a stone staircase, a walk that puts you above everything for miles.
