In 1798, the first permanent American settlers from the east arrived in the Western Reserve of Ohio. They began to clear the forests along the southern shore of Lake Erie. And in the process, they found numerous ancient earthen structures and almost everywhere the finely made spear points and other artefacts of a long forgotten and once populous native society — a people obviously quite different from the Massasauga Indians then living in that country.
Mound building was a central feature of the public architecture of many Native American and Mesoamerican cultures from Chile to Minnesota. Thousands of mounds in America have been destroyed as a result of farming, pot-hunting, amateur and professional arc ©Image Source: Public Domain
A generation before the first immigrant explorers of western Pennsylvania and southern Ohio had made similar discoveries: the extensive earthworks of Circleville and Marietta, Ohio, were already well publicized by the time that settler Aaron Wright and his companions began to stake out their new homes along Conneaut Creek, in what would later become Ashtabula County, Ohio.
Perhaps it was because he was a single young man with plenty of energy, or perhaps it was because his choice for a homestead included a large “mound builder” burial ground. Whatever the reasons may have been, Aaron Wright has gone down in the history books as the discoverer of the “Conneaut Giants,” the unusually large-boned ancient inhabitants of Ashtabula County, Ohio.
In an 1844 account, Harvey Nettleton reported that this “ancient burying grounds of about four acres” was situated in what soon became the village of New Salem (later renamed Conneaut), “extending northward from the bank of the creek to Main Street, in an oblong square.”
“The ancient graves were distinguished by slight depressions in the surface of the earth disposed in straight rows, with the intervening spaces, or alleys, covering the whole area. It’s estimated to contain from two to three thousand graves.
These depressions, on a thorough examination made by Esq. Aaron Wright, as early as 1800, were found invariably to contain human bones, blackened with time, which on exposure to the air soon crumbled to dust.
