Ohio’s modern roads have link to past
Today, Ohio is crisscrossed by an intricate series of freeways, toll roads, and highways complemented by the roads, streets and alleys of our better populated places. It is a network that we take for granted even as it takes immense efforts by many people to keep these roads safe, passable and easy to use. Because these roads are generally well-paved and reasonably new, we often tend to forget how long they have been here.
In the case of some of our older roads, they have been here for a very long time. Others are no longer with us.
People have been living in central Ohio for several thousand years. Many of the earliest arrivals were traveling bands of hunters and their families who centered their lives around the animal herds they pursued. These people – there were not many of them – left little behind. They made their clothing, shelters and even their weapons from the animals they hunted. They left little behind but a few stone arrowheads to tell us they were here. If they followed any kind of road, it was the trails of the animals they followed.
Change came when Native Americans began to settle down a few hundred years before the current era. The need for more food for larger populations led to an agriculture and the need to stay in one place for some time. Over the course of that time, these people created economies, societies and cultures characterized by ever more sophisticated earthen structures for funeral, ceremonial and defensive purposes. Since these people had no written language, we have come to call them the “mound builders” and continue to be amazed by their strength energy and ingenuity.
These people followed the trails previously established by animal herds and their hunter forebears. But they also built new roads of their own. Just as an example, when early settlers from the east came to central Ohio they found a 40-foot-tall mound at what is now the intersection of Mound and High streets. There were smaller burial mounds near what is now Statehouse Square and the intersection of Spring and High streets where a fast-moving creek 20 feet wide in a deep ditch swept downhill from high ground to the nearby Scioto River.
Across the river, an early resident of frontier Franklinton remembered scattered burial mounds near the river bank and a parallel set of earthen walls the width a street between them that marched from the river to a nearby grove of walnut trees on higher ground.
All of that − mounds, walls and even the walnut grove and the great mound at Mound Street − are gone now. And these were not the greatest roads of the Mound Builders. Archeologists at the Ohio History Connection speculate that a great road built by the Hopewell People once linked the elaborate earthworks at Newark to earthen necropolis now called Mound City near Chillicothe – a distance of many miles. But if it once was as surmised, it too is gone now.
The Mound Builders had left Ohio for reasons even now not clear by 1400 in the current era and their place in Ohio was taken by what would later become called the “historic” tribes who had direct contact – often violent – with European explorers, hunters and later settlers from beyond the mountains to the east. For a number of years after 1650, the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois people occupied what is now Ohio. But by 1750, the Iroquois had largely withdrawn from the Ohio Country to defend their homeland in the Mohawk Valley of what is now New York.
Many other tribes entered Ohio at that time – The Delawares to the east and the Miami to the west, the Wyandot to the north and the ambulatory Iroquois called Mingo in central and northwest Ohio. And from the forks of the Scioto and Olentangy along the Scioto to the Ohio were the Shawnee.
All of these people used a variety of paths and trails connecting their villages one with another and providing access between Lake Erie and the Ohio River. The major trails were wide and well-traveled. In 1914, William Corliss Mills, the first Director of the Ohio Archeological and Historical Society, published an elaborate county-by-county archeological guide to the state. As part of its introduction, he included commentary and a map of Native American trails and towns.
In Franklin County, the major trail was called the Scioto Trail. Of it, Mills wrote that, “Of striking importance was the Scioto Trail running north and south through the state, between Sandusky Bay and the mouth of the Scioto River. Ascending the Scioto River, crossing the portage and descending the Scioto to its juncture with the Ohio, the Scioto Trail crossed the river and joined the famous “Warrior’s Path” leading far into the south land.”
Today, U.S. Route 23 travels much the same way and in many cases in the same path as the original trail.
It is a living and continuing link between the past and present of Ohio.
Ed Lentz is a local historian and author who writes about Columbus-area history.