“So Majestic a Monument of Antiquity”: Landscape, Knowledge, and Authority in the Early National West

In the spring of 1791, the Ohio Company of Associates was consumed with questions about the ornamentation of town squares. In the young town of Marietta, the first legal settlement in the Northwest Territory, the Associates formulated a detailed outline of how each public space should be planted and maintained. In one instance, they legislated that the square named Quadranaou be planted with a specific pattern of sugar maple, white maple, and mulberry trees and directed that “the Elevated square with the Ascents leading to the same be immediately put into Grass, and hereafter no other ways occupied—[ and] the whole to be left in good Post and Rail fence.” Likewise, they delegated the care of a raised road called the Sacra Via to their most respected leader; he was expected to “attend particularly to its preservation in its present form and seed it to Grass.”¹

While the Associates directed the care of these spaces, they had not constructed the central features of these squares (Figure 1). The geometric earth forms at their centers were part of a mysterious complex of earthworks at the junction of the Ohio and Muskingum rivers, which Company leaders had scouted in the 1780s. The Company chose this site for its new town, and rather than ignoring or destroying the features, the men venerated and publicized them. Two centuries later, archaeologists would identify these features and objects excavated from within them as the products of the native Adena and Hopewell peoples, who lived in the Ohio River Valley between 1000 BC and 500 AD (Figure 2).² But in the early republic, the features provided enigmatic evidence of former inhabitants of the American continent. After all, the Native Americans who lived in the Ohio country professed no specific knowledge of the structures. By labeling the earthworks and the objects uncovered from them “American antiquities,” western migrants convinced citizens throughout the United States that these landmarks would inform the history of their new nation.

As the traffic of settlers and travelers increased in the Ohio Valley after 1800, the importance of antiquities to national culture shifted. After Ohio became a state in 1803, its residents sought recognition as authorities on the landscape by contrasting their own observations with those of outsiders, calling them generic, exaggerated, or both. In publishing their own findings and theories, residents began to link the collection and discussion of antiquities primarily to Ohio and only secondarily to the nation as a whole. In the 1810s, this search for local authority prompted some Ohioans to establish institutions, correspondence networks, and publications throughout the state to produce information about the West, in the West.

Figure 1.

A rare threedimensional depiction of the Marietta earthworks before settlement, likely sketched by Rufus Putnam. Printed in Harris, Journal of a Tour, n.p., Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

This study of the ways that Ohioans created knowledge about western lands, and in turn, about themselves, engages two bodies of historical literature: works about western landscape and identity and studies about the development of American intellectual networks and cultural institutions. Historians have long recognized that “from the beginning Americans had sought their identity in their relationship to the land they had settled.”³ In order to appraise how westerners built state and regional identities, some historians have discussed the importance of the Land Ordinance of 1785 in imposing a grid on the landscape. Others have argued that the economic relationships that developed along the Ohio River and subsequent transportation networks unified Ohioans.⁴ Yet in explaining identity vis-à-vis landscape, these studies invoke a process by which settlers internalized a landscape feature as a symbol or common experience without detailing how this process transpired and created a shared identity.⁵ In another body of literature, historians have detailed the formation of transatlantic intellectual networks during colonial expansion and the effect that American independence had on this system. Yet none has examined how similar processes occurred during western expansion in the United States. Scholars who have studied American...