Walking through history in Marietta

Fifteen people gathered in front of the Washington County Library's Marietta Branch Saturday morning to learn more about history.

The group participated in Hidden Marietta's Ancient Earthworks tour of Hopewell and Adena mounds in Marietta.

The tour took participants to the Capitoleum Mound upon which the library is built, the Quadranou Mound at Third and Sacra Via streets and the Conus Mound in Mound Cemetery.

Hidden Marietta tour leader Emily Kubota is in her second year leading tours.

"Hidden Marietta is primarily known for their ghost tours here in town, but they focus on the hidden and unusual side of Marietta, untold historical sites, things like that," Kubota said.

Kubota said she has been in historical preservation for almost 20 years and that the Ancient Earthworks tour is based on academic sources as opposed to local legends.

The tour lasted 90 minutes and involved about 1.5 miles of walking. The cost of the tour was $15.

The Hidden Marietta website said that the "tour is a fantastic opportunity to step way back in time" and that the mounds, or earthworks as they are also called, in the Marietta area are more than 2,000 years old.

Kubota told tour goers about the uses for the mounds, including the Capitoleum Mound.

"Based on archeology and what we know about other mound sites, we think that maybe this location was important because of the (Ohio and Muskingum Rivers) and because of how it aligns with the stars," she said.

She also said mound builders built about 10,000 mounds in the Mid-Ohio Valley alone, but only about 1,000 of the mounds are known. Most are on private property and are really small and not easily recognizable as mounds,

Kubota said there are very few burial mounds but "Marietta does have a large burial mound," the Conus Mound, in Mound Cemetery.

According to Kubota, the purpose of non-burial mounds, such as the Quadranou or Capitolium mounds, is that they served as religious spots that may have been used for ceremonies, but no one is sure. Kubota discussed three mounds including the Quaternou Mound. She said it is locally known as the Turtle Mound. It is a flat-topped mound with four ramps built by the Hopewell people around 900 A.D.

"We know it's a Hopewell mound because it's geometric," she said about the mound.

Quaternou Mound had 90 degree square angles and the ramps are the same size, she said..

The mound is 180 feet long, 32 feet wide and 10 feet tall and the four ramps are 60 feet long and 25 feet wide.

"So if you think of how much dirt they had to move just to make this one mound. It's really pretty astounding," Kubota said. "You've got to think, this is before the wheel had been introduced. This is before domesticated animals like oxen, horses, this is before them. So they're using wooden sticks and moving dirt by putting it in baskets on their back and physically hauling it to the site."

Earthen walls that encircle and connect the Quaternou and Capitoleum mounds run to the Muskingum River, Kubota said. The 40 foot wide walls were 680 feet long and at their shortest were 8 feet tall and 30 feet high at their tallest.

Families in Marietta used to picnic on top of a section of the walls that ran from the Quaternou Mound to the Muskingum River, called the Sacra Via, until they were torn down in the mid-1800s, she said.

Diana Knight from Williamstown and her friend Nancy Nelson from Marietta attended the tour.

Knight said they decided to go on the tour because "we thought it'd be something we'd do and enjoy and just to learn more about Marietta," Knight said. "It's a very historic and interesting town."

Nelson, who has lived in Marietta for five years, said she has never been on a historic tour in Marietta, but she has visited the mounds in Chillicothe. She said after going on the tour she would "absolutely" go on another historic tour in Marietta. To learn more about the tour, go to https://www.hiddenmarietta.com/ancient-earthworks.

Michelle Dillon can be reached at mdillon@newsandsentinel.com