Fort Hill State Memorial

Fort Hill is a Hopewell culture earthwork built about 2,000 years ago on a flat-topped ridge in Highland County, Ohio: a wall of earth more than a mile and a half in circumference, six to fifteen feet high, enclosing 35.3 acres, with 39 openings in the wall, 36 of them documented as deliberately built. Archaeologists do not read it as a fort; the standard interpretation, reflected at the site itself, is that it was built for religious and ceremonial purposes, one of Ohio's hilltop enclosures from the same ceremonial world as the Hopewell earthworks to the north. Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis excavated here in 1846 and featured Fort Hill in their 1848 volume Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. Fort Hill is not part of the UNESCO-listed Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, so this entry records it on its own.

The memorial sits inside one of Ohio's most protected natural areas, co-managed by the Arc of Appalachia Preserve System and the Ohio History Connection, with old-growth forest and more than 11 miles of steep trails. The earthen wall is subtle: most visitors experience it as a walk through deep forest on a big ridge, which is a fair description of what a hilltop enclosure was.

Visiting

The Arc of Appalachia Preserve System co-manages the site with the Ohio History Connection. Trails are open sunrise to sunset daily; parking lots are not winter-maintained, and trails close during the annual deer management hunt (the week after Thanksgiving and the Saturday-Sunday before Christmas). No admission fee is listed. Five trails include the 2.2-mile Fort Trail, a steep climb to the enclosure; the trails are difficult. Call 937-365-1935.

Photo: Aesopposea, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons ([source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fort_Hill_State_Memorial,_Highland_County,_Ohio.jpg))