ONTARIO — Lisa Secrist’s fourth grade students held out their arms for balance and climbed up the mound one by one. Their giddy chatter echoed off the surrounding trees.
The slightly muddy surface was covered with brush, sticks and autumn leaves, just like the rest of the woods. At first glance, the mound blended right into the scene. But the students knew something special was beneath their tiny tennis shoes.
An ancient Native American burial ground.
Officials at Ontario Local Schools recently discovered a burial mound sitting in the woods at the edge of the school district’s property.
Fourth grader Jillian Ramey said she was amazed when Secrist told her class Native Americans had built a burial mound within walking distance of their school.
“It’s the first mound I ever saw. I didn’t even know there was things called mounds,” Ramey said. “I didn’t even know there was people before us.”
Rediscovering the burial mound
Until a couple of years ago, Supt. Keith Strickler hadn’t thought much about the previous residents of modern-day Ontario.
It wasn’t until a family trip to the Serpent Mound that he began to wonder who may have inhabited his own hometown before European settlers arrived.
“When I grew up, everything was about Christopher Columbus and that was kind of when history started,” he said. “We didn’t spend a lot of time learning about the people that were here before us.”
Strickler went home and began researching local history. He found a library book with copies of Richland County’s land surveys from 1806.
One page, marked with red dots, showed the locations of Native American burial mounds in Richland County. There were three in and around Ontario.
Strickler started with a dot right at the border with Crawford County. The spot on the map is now a field, meaning the mound was likely destroyed to make way for farmland. Another sat on private property.
Then Strickler zeroed in on the third point — it was right on the edge of the school soccer field.
“I grew up here, went to school here,” he said. “How did I not know that there was a mound right here on school grounds?”
Strickler, who worked in Crestline at the time, drove to Ontario High School. He walked out on the soccer field, armed with the modern-day aerial map he’d compared to the 1806 survey. He looked out and saw nothing. The mound was hidden by brush.
He left dejected, assuming it had been destroyed. It wasn’t until years later, after the autumn leaves had fallen and the brush had died down, that he finally saw it.
“My jaw about hit the ground. I was like a little kid,” Strickler recalled. “I was so excited.”
Mound likely built by the Adena people
Even after he located the burial mound, Strickler said he remained skeptical about its origins. He recruited the high school science club to survey it and take soil samples.
The club determined the mound is about ten feet tall, 82 feet wide and 132 feet long.
The students also found the soil was similar to the surrounding earth — absent of sand, rocks or other materials. Those results meant it’s unlikely the mound came from prehistoric glacial movement or construction debris.
Sarah Hinkelman of the Ohio History Connection said the mound’s size and shape is characteristic of the Adena people — Native Americans who occupied the area from about 800 B.C. to 1 A.D.
The Adena culture is an archeological term that refers to Native Americans living in parts of Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Pennsylvania and West Virginia during the Early Woodland Period, which spanned from about 800 B.C. to 1 A.D.
According to the Ohio History Connection, the Adena people were semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers.
They lived in small villages but moved around frequently as they followed animal herds and other food sources.
They also domesticated various crops in their gardens, including squash, sunflowers, sumpweed, goosefoot, knotweed, maygrass and tobacco. They were also the first people to produce clay pottery in Ohio.
The Adena people are best known for the conical burial mounds they constructed throughout central and southern Ohio. The Miamisburg Mound is the largest remaining example of an Adena burial mound in the state.
Archeologists believe the mounds connected generations of the Adena to their land, functioning as both cemeteries and territorial markers.
“Every culture has different ways of people honoring the people that went before them,” said Hinkelman, the historical site manager at Newark Earthworks. “The mounds act not only as a place of burial, but like a gravestone too.”
Adena mounds now extremely rare
Hinkelman said that at one time, Ohio was home to around 10,000 mounds and 100 earthworks — larger burial mounds arranged in geometric shapes.
Today, the mounds are extremely rare. Many were destroyed to make way for construction or farmland.
Strickler said Ontario’s mound almost suffered the same fate.
“If it would have been just a little bit to the west, it would have been destroyed by a farmer,” he said. “If it would have been a little bit to the south, the school would have destroyed it when they were putting in the soccer complex.”
“It’s amazing to me how quickly we can lose our local history.”
Hinkelman estimated there are probably fewer than 100 well-preserved, publicly accessible burial mounds in Ohio. Ohio law now protects mounds on government-owned land, but private land owners are still free to do what they wish.
Strickler said the district is dedicated to preserving the mound and making sure all Ontario students know the story behind it. He plans to have a walking path installed this winter so people can visit the mound without walking across the soccer fields.
Before Secrist’s fourth grade class ventured into the woods to see the mound, Strickler told them about the history.
He also reminded them the mound is now legally protected — that means no digging allowed.
“The thing I want to stress to people is that they never dig in that. That mound is doing exactly what it was built to do,” Strickler said.
“Would we go over to our cemetery, over behind Stingel, and just start digging in it? No. It’s the same thing here,” he told the students. “We’re not going to go dig up their cemetery, because that’s what that is.”
Teacher says mound brings history to life
Hinkelman said its common practice among modern archaeologists and historians to respect the sacred origins of Adena mounds and not disturb them.
But past excavations from the late 1800s and early 1900s tell us what may be buried inside.
In addition to human skeletons or cremains, the Adena often interred a variety of artifacts like copper bracelets, earspools, shells, beads, carved pipes, dart points and pottery.
Historians speculate the Adena left these items as offerings to the person buried or that they had some kind of significance to the dead.
Secrist said she and other teachers have enjoyed diving deeper into the history of the Adena with their students.
“We have learned so much in the last year about this. I knew basics about the mound builders, but I’ve delved into it a little bit more, especially with the kids,” she said.
“This is exciting. It brings history to life. This is real for them. This is history literally in their backyard.”