Among these bones uncovered from an extensive ancient burying ground, were some belonging to men of gigantic structure.
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.
The strange discoveries of Aaron Wright in 1800
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.”
Harvey Nettleton noted in his account:
“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.
The prehistoric cemetery on Aaron Wright’s land was remarkable enough, just in its size and the configuration of the graves; but it was what was in those graves and in the adjacent burial mounds that captured Nettleton’s attention.
The mounds that were situated in the eastern part of what is now the village of Conneaut and the extensive burying ground near the Presbyterian Church appear to have had no connection with the burying places of the Indians. They doubtlessly refer to a more remote period and are the relics of an extinct race, of whom the Indians had no knowledge.
Skulls were taken from these mounds, the cavities of which were of sufficient capacity to admit the head of an ordinary man, and jaw-bones that might be fitted on over the face with equal facility.
The bones of the arms and lower limbs were of the same proportions, exhibiting ocular proof of the degeneracy of the human race since the period in which these men occupied the soil which we now inhabit.”
What Nehemiah King found in 1829
An 1847 sketch of Fort Hill by Chas. Whittlesey, surveyor © Image Source: Public Domain
Nettleton’s account was widely circulated when it was summarized in Henry Howe’s Historical Collections of Ohio, 1847. Howe writes of Thomas Montgomery and Aaron Wright coming to Ohio in the spring of 1798, and of the subsequent discovery of the “extensive burying ground” and of “the human bones found in the mounds” nearby.
Howe repeats the report that among these uncovered bones, “were some belonging to men of gigantic structure.” He also tells how, in 1829, a tree was cut down next to the ancient “Fort Hill in Conneaut” and that the local land owner, “The Hon. Nehemiah King, with a magnifying glass, counted 350 annualer rings” beyond some cut marks near the tree’s center.
