Newark Earthworks essays for the Advocate

Newark Earthworks editorial essay - Spring 2022
Jeff Gill

On foot around the earthworks
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Over the last thirty-plus years, I've had the pleasure of leading thousands of people on tours of the Newark Earthworks.

They arrive on school buses, some in tour coaches riding high, or in flotillas of cars from the local college campus.

Groups are a large number of our visitors, but people come from farther away individually or as couples, unscheduled and uncertain, sometimes attaching themselves to larger groups as we walk and talk. And on open house days or other planned events, those of us who lead tours meet people who sometimes came after weeks and months of planning and anticipation.

Whether a retired couple on vacation, or three yellow busloads of excited and energetic schoolchildren, one part of the process I enjoy is helping visitors get their feet on the ground, and seeing the earthworks as the original builders did, two thousand years ago, shortly after the construction phase was over.

And while the big groups coming to see the major preservation locations are rewarding to guide and inform, at the Great Circle off Rt. 79 and the Octagon Earthworks at the end of Parkview and 33rd St., they are but two sections of what was originally a four and a half square mile geometric earthen enclosure. Yes, we've lost a great deal; yes, we should be thankful for the foresight of community leaders and average citizens who set aside the Circle as county fairgrounds by 1854, and saw fit to tax themselves to purchase and preserve the Octagon earthworks in a public vote of 1892.

But what I've come to truly enjoy is taking groups, a dozen or two at a time, on foot across the landscape of modern Newark, to visit the pieces that have, in most cases, been accidentally preserved. Some now have protections around them, others at risk, but my best strategy right now I believe is simply to take people to see them, step by step, and raise our awareness of just how much remains even between our two grand monuments at either end of the majestic original whole.

There are subtleties in how the Native American builders used the landscape, and how the terrain today both hides and can help reveal what was built here millennia ago. You can't catch it as you drive along in your car; from a high bus window you miss much traveling in between. And our contemporary obsession with aerial views, overhead maps, now drone perspectives, can lift our eyes so far up we miss what's right at our feet.

These tours are quiet and discreet; we travel on public streets and sidewalks, and a few alleys, but some of what we're viewing is beyond where we can go, so I don't promote these locations casually. The Wright Earthworks is owned by the Ohio History Connection, a central fragment whose location can be shared abroad, and where we can triangulate from there to lost elements now only seen on old maps . . . or occasionally, to locate another small piece hiding in plain sight.

The research, the learning, the discovery still continues. Sometimes, just step by step.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he leads tours as a volunteer with the Newark Earthworks Center at Ohio State Newark and for the Ohio History Connection, and is a World Heritage Ambassador.