Precontact History of Wayne County
Before the 1600s, Wayne County and Northeast Ohio were home to Indigenous cultures that were the first known people to call Ohio home.
These cultures spanned thousands of years, but they all utilized Ohio’s rich lands to sustain their communities. Many also produced artworks and tools. In Wayne County, earthworks and artifacts give us a glimpse into the lives of those who lived here hundreds or thousands of years before us.
Below is a timeline created by the Wooster Digital History Project which briefly outlines periods of Indigenous history before European contact and the era of today’s formally recognized tribes.
Local Pre-Contact Cultures
During the Woodland period, from about 800 BCE (Before Common Era) onward, cultures such as the Hopewell and Adena began to build earthen structures, oftentimes called mounds. These cultures found the time to build mounds as they stayed in one location and farmed. These mounds had many purposes: sometimes religious and sometimes social. Especially during the Late Woodland Period (500 BCE-1200 CE), they were used for defense.
Some of the most famous mounds in Ohio are the Hopewell Mounds in Newark, Ohio, which were aligned with astrological happenings, such as the rising and setting moon.
Looking at the map below from the 1914 Archeological Atlas of Ohio, many of the surviving mounds were in the southern half of the state, close to rivers. However, Wayne County also had earthworks, mainly grouped around Killbuck Creek. Farmers and plunderers destroyed many of these mounds throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1Kardulias, “A Small Prehistoric Mound Group in Wayne County, Northeast Ohio,” 65. Some, however, survived.
In 2014, Nick Kardulias, a professor of archeology at The College of Wooster, published a paper on a cluster of mounds at the Pee Wee Hollow campsite (West Salem, Wayne County, OH), that are most likely from the Adena period. Kardulias predicted that the mounds may have been for ceremonial purposes.2Kardulias, “A Small Prehistoric Mound Group in Wayne County, Northeast Ohio,” 71-72. Early archeological records also list several earthen enclosures such as Fort Hill (not to be confused with a site by the same name in Highland County, Ohio), that were likely places for Indigenous commercial or religious gatherings in Wayne County.3BF Bowen, History of Wayne County, Ohio, 10.
Many mounds used for burial contained human remains. According to Nick Kardulias, human remains from one site on the OARDC campus were allegedly given to Ashland University in 1920.4Kardulias, “A Small Prehistoric Mound Group in Wayne County, Northeast Ohio,” 63. In his essay for B.F. Bowen’s History of Wayne County, Ohio (1910), Dr. J. H. Todd describes an incident where a group of Delawares came to his grandfather’s residence to ask for remains that his grandfather had found and fashioned into a “play-house,” which were then properly buried.5Kardulias, “A Small Prehistoric Mound Group in Wayne County, Northeast Ohio,” 87.
What happened to these cultures?
Local historians such as Benjamin Douglass have theories that Indigenous people “lapsed into barbarism” at some point before the arrival of Europeans.6Douglass, History of Wayne County, Ohio, 9. This stereotype made Indigenous people encountered by white settlers seem “uncivilized” compared to ancient cultures. In reality, many Indigenous people in Ohio caught diseases such as smallpox, brought over by European settlers and passed through trade. However, some Indigenous people survived and would return to Ohio in the 1700s.