Old Fort Earthworks: Hopewell’s square on the Ohio

Old Fort Earthworks (site 15Gp1) is a square earthen enclosure on a terrace above the Ohio floodplain. It surrounds 13.5 acres; its north and south walls run 825 feet and its east and west walls 822 feet, and its corners, not its walls, point to the four cardinal directions.

Pairs of long, low parallel embankments, the “arms,” run out from the east and west walls, and walled roads once tied this group to the rest of the complex across the river, which E. G. Squier mapped in 1847. In 1774 a surveying party under Hanson, laying off land at the mouth of the Scioto for Patrick Henry, noted the enclosure in their journal and wrongly guessed it was the ruin of a 1750s stone trading house. WPA crews mapped and trenched it in 1938, the only systematic excavation, and found how the walls were built: the builders left the old topsoil in place, spread about two feet of nearby soil and humus over it, heaped thousands of basketloads of sand, gravel, loam, and clay into a six-foot core, then dressed the slope with yellow-brown clay.

They also filled ravines and cut slopes to keep the walls level, and they and later Native groups kept the interior clean. It was listed on the National Register on Dec. 4, 1980, as Portsmouth Earthworks, Group A. The Kentucky Archaeological Survey does not publish site locations, so the map pin is the National Register point rounded to two decimals.