It’s a surprise to pick up a book like A. Banning Norton’s history of Knox County and find that, as far as that author was concerned, this place was created out of thin air in 1779.

He doesn’t even acknowledge that different societies preceded this one by hundreds and even thousands of years. But one doesn’t have to look far to see that something else came first, though you do have to know what you’re looking at.

  • This image from the 1915 Ohio Archaeological Atlas shows the perfect form this mound had even after the initial round of destructive alterations for modern burials. Later changes lowered the mound drastically.

  • The original mound of Mound View Cemetery is officially known as the McLaughlin Mound. In addition to an ancient Adena burial at the base of the mound, a later historical American Indian burial was discovered at the base of the mound, believed to be Chief Sac-a-manc.

  • When 18-year old Henry Cooper died in 1894, his family arranged for him to be buried at the foot of the mound. When sextons dug the grave, they discovered bones and grave goods that might be the remains of the feared Delaware Indian chief Sac-A-Manc.

  • An image from the 1915 Ohio Archaeological Atlas shows the various layers of the mound as it was excavated in 1890 by the Bureau of American Ethnology. 

  • This spear point was recently discovered on the McLaughlin Mound by grounds keeping staff at Mound View Cemetery. Mansfield archaeologist Mark Hersman confirms that it is consistent with Adena style.

  • Though nowhere as old as the mound (which is probably 2,000 to 2,500 years old), the ancient oak tree that overlooks the mound at least predates the modern cemetery.

  • An old wall of mostly empty crypts was built into one side of the McLaughlin Mound. The top of the mound was apparently lopped off for later burials and monuments. Since 1972, the mound has been on the National Register of Historic Places, which will hopefully limit any further destruction.

The first piece of evidence stands on the northern edge of Mount Vernon and lends itself to the name of Mound View Cemetery. This historical burial ground attached itself to an ancient burial mound. It should also be pointed out that there is another mound down the hill behind the cemetery chapel.

That is not an ancient mound. It was built as part of the chapel so that bodies of those who died at the height of winter could be stored there until burial in the spring, according to Mound View Cemetery’s Robert Snow. The chapel mound is sometimes misidentified as an Indian mound on the internet.

The ancient mound is officially known as the McLaughlin Mound, presumably after an early land owner. No one by that name is on the 1810 tax list, but a separate list of founding settlers does list an “A. McLaughlin.”

The mound stands at the summit of the hill that overlooks Mount Vernon from the north, and this commanding position must have made it a desirable sacred spot to the residents of this region long ago. This culture we now call the Adena people, taking the name from the estate of early Ohio governor Thomas Worthington, where a similar mound was first excavated.

The Adena culture appears to have gradually emerged from the archaic native culture 3,000 to 3,500 years ago. It was centered in southern Ohio, though signs of the culture can be found in archaeological sites far east as Maryland and as far west as Wisconsin.

The people of this society appeared to have been widely dispersed in small clusters, coming together periodically for meetings and sacred ceremonies, including burial.

The McLaughlin Mound was already incorporated into the cemetery before any excavation was attempted. White burials began to be clustered around the mound starting in 1833, although attentive observers might find a few dates older than that in the cemetery. This is because Mount Vernon’s early town cemetery on East Chestnut Street later became prime real estate, so the bodies were dug up and moved to this location in 1851.

In 1845, Aaron Loveridge performed a partial excavation of the mound, finding at the original ground level a sandstone-lined tomb with a skeleton inside. This is typical of Adena mounds, where a stone or wooden grave is covered with earth. In some cases, additional burials are made later, raising the level of the mound.

Loveridge indeed missed an additional burial, but it turned out not to be an original Adena addition to the mound.

On July 30, 1894, two cemetery sextons were digging a grave for Henry Cooper at the foot of the mound — many Coopers were buried on or near the mound — when they uncovered a Native American burial. This skeleton had some artifacts with it, including a shell necklace and copper bracelets, which are plausible enough grave goods for an Adena burial.

But this skeleton also included a copper breastplate, which would be a unique if not impossible item for the Adena. The clincher, however, was an iron tomahawk-pipe. The Adena never had the technology to work with iron, proving that this grave was a much later interpolation to the mound, from some point after the coming of the Europeans.

The quality of the historical-period artifacts, combined with the prominence of the grave on an ancient mound led local antiquarians to theorize that this was the burial of the Delaware Indian chief Sac-A-Manc, who was dreaded by the early settlers of Knox County.

A description of the effect he had on the frontier was dramatically described in the early novel Philip Seymour, or Pioneer Life in Richland County, Ohio written by James Francis M’Gaw and published in 1858:

This was the same notorious Chief whose name was a terror to many a poor pioneer family. Like a stealthy tiger, he sought his prey in ambuscade. The name of Sac-A-Manc was well known among the pioneers on Owl Creek, Knox County, where he distinguished himself in the scalping business.

The condition of this region, therefore, at this period, was indeed perilous. The country was desolated, and everywhere were seen scouting parties of Indians.

One early account even identifies Sac-A-Manc as meeting up with a French-Canadian trader around Detroit and brandishing three scalps he had taken on his last trip to Owl Creek, the body of water today known as the Kokosing River, bisecting Knox County.

But Sac-A-Manc’s reign of terror ended in 1812 when he was killed. It was theorized that members of his tribe may have buried Sac-A-Manc on the old mound to honor him. Conversely, though, M’Gaw’s novel describes Sac-A-Manc as being killed in a skirmish near Lake Erie. Could his corpse have been brought such a distance and buried without frontier settlers witnessing it?

The answer is unknown.

Aside from the possible grave of Sac-A-Manc, it seems that the original Adena burial was the only one in the mound. According to the 1915 Archaeological Atlas of Ohio, the mound was excavated in 1890 by the Bureau of American Ethnology, though one wonders how if it was Sac-A-Manc!

Perhaps, like Loveridge in 1845, they merely dug a cross-section trench across the mound. As new graves began to overtake the mound, they also may have been forced to leave parts of it untouched. Anything along the original top half of the mound would have been revealed when the top was lopped off to provide a flat surface for the double-faced Cooper and Whitesides monuments.

This monument came after the photo in the atlas, which showed a perfectly conical tall mound, and this alteration seriously compromised the mound. It’s hard to see it as anything less than desecration of a sacred site.

If the original tenant of the mound was, in fact, the only one buried there in ancient times, it suggests that he or she was a very important person. Early to mid-Adena burials tend to have multiple people in one mound. Single-person mounds, based on carbon dating of artifacts to between 500 BC and 200 AD, tend to be a late Adena phenomenon, perhaps suggesting the development of a more hierarchical society with power concentrated at the top, with an important leader demanding special separate burial.

The long-term effectiveness of such top-heavy power systems can be measured by how well we remember this person’s name today.

The forgotten tenant has been replaced with early movers and shakers of the society which has occupied the area for only a little over 200 years. We only have to keep this going another 1,500 years to match the Adena culture’s run.