NEWARK

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Enter and leave the Newark area via SR 16 from the east (Granville) or west.

Newark Earthworks, CERHAS Rendering

Downtown Newark: From Granville, take the Newark-Granville Road, which joins the limited-access Highway 16. From the downtown exit (SR 13), head south to the impressive Victorian Licking County Courthouse in the middle of its square. Around the square are good shops and restaurants, plus a rare architectural gem: a Louis Sullivan-designed bank building of 1914. The history of the town and its impressive industrial legacies is well told at The Works Museum, on the southern edge of downtown, featuring especially the making of glass. The Works complex also includes shops, artists’ studios, and a canal-era lock-keepers house.

The Newark Earthworks: Two of the most impressive features of the ancient Newark Earthworks remain today, helping visitors grasp the literally unbelievable scope, beauty, and precision of this unique architecture. The Newark Earthworks were the largest integrated complex of geometric earthen architecture in the world. Awed settlers discovered, described, and began to measure it in the early 1800s, but then began to wear them down though farming, roads, houses, and industries. The impact of these monuments on the visitor today is still stunning, creating an architectural experience like no other on earth. A small museum at the Great Circle orients visitors to the complex.

The Great Circle Earthworks: From downtown Newark take Main Street west, then turn south on Route 79 for 1½ miles to the Great Circle Earthworks on the right, also known as “Moundbuilders State Memorial.” The small museum and visitors’ center provides an orientation to the whole complex and its history with a bronze tabletop model out front, an interactive exhibit program, and interpretive materials from the Ohio Historical Society and the staff of the Licking County CVB. Directly across from the front door is the gateway of the Great Circle enclosure, the largest monumental portal ever made by the Ancient Ohioans. Follow the inner ditch and notice the subtle gradations in the height and steepness of the wall. Imagine the wall’s inner surface as originally lined with yellowish colored clay and contrasting with the rest of the soil. At the center of the circle, the so-called “Eagle Mound” is an elegantly undulating earthen memorial built over the remains of a long, timber-framed building with two “wings”. Outside the gateway and to the north are well-preserved remains of the low embankment walls that once encircled the entire Newark complex with a continuous outline. Outside near the parking lot is a large borrow pit from which some of the soil was taken to build the wall.

Great Circle Gateway, Tim Black

The Wright Earthworks: Leaving the parking lot, turn right twice and drive around the Great Circle, continuing with a right turn on Cooper (along the park which flanks the northern arc of the circle. At the end of Cooper, go left on Williams and follow it for about six blocks and go right on Waldo (the last street before the railroad tracks). When Waldo ends, the Wright Earthworks are directly across James Street. These remnants include small pieces of the square and one of the connecting passage walls. From here, the water tower to the northeast will help in grasping the scale of the earthwork complex as a whole: it stands near the center of the giant ellipse, now destroyed, where the Newark Shaman figurine was found. The adjacent highway approximates the route of the canal (which cut right through the ancient square) visible on the Squier and Davis map.

The Octagon Earthworks: Continue northward on Williams or 21st Street to Main Street, turn left to 30th Street, then north to Parkview, then left again. At the end of the street, turn into the parking lot of the Moundbuilders Country Club, and park on the right. Here at the heart of the Octagon Earthworks, a small wooden platform has been built to offer an orientation, and views into the ancient earthen Avenue connecting the giant Observatory Circle (left) with the open-cornered Octagon (right). Looking out over these walls it is impossible to miss their precision: perfectly uniform, perfectly level on top, and transforming our human eye-level into some kind of giant, artificial, calibrated horizon.

Moonrise over Octagon, CERHAS Rendering

The Observatory Mound and Circle: If golfers are not present (there are several “golf-free days” each year), walk the grounds thoroughly; it will take between one and two hours. Follow the giant circle to the left, as far as the Observatory Mound. From the top of this feature, ancient shamans could observe the perfect alignment of the moon at its northernmost rising, appearing along the axis of the Avenue and across the center-point and distant gateway of the Octagon, over half a mile away. In an unusual and elegant detail, the ancients designed the sides of the circle so they don’t quite meet, but rather seem to curve gently inward and underneath the Observatory Mound, from which they emerge on the outside as two small tails (This exact configuration is the result of a 19th century partial reconstruction, though faithful to the earliest accounts). Continue around or through the northern half of the circle towards the far, left flank of the Octagon. Views across the circle’s interior emphasize the remarkable precision of this “artificial horizon” as a sighting instrument. The diameter is so great (1,054 feet) that it’s possible to nearly lose the feeling of being within such a precisely enclosed space.

A Lunar Observatory: At the Octagon’s cleverly-designed gateways, the monumental effect is more clear: Perfect, flat-topped mounds block the vistas out of the open corners so that inside we are both contained and released, with subtle shifts in these effects as we move around inside. The distance across the Octagon is even larger than that of the circle; views from one gateway to its opposite are nearly lost, especially when the air is hazy. Yet sighting along these walls, and point to point across the geometric figure and on to the horizons beyond, was a major function of this place. Drs. Hively and Horn of Earlham College have demonstrated the immense sophistication of this geometric arrangement, in which specific point-to-point alignments, or lines along walls, mark all eight of key locations along the horizon during the moon’s complex 18.6-year cycle.

Walls and Gateways, Octagon Earthworks

Inside the Octagon at Sunrise

Walls and Gateways: The northernmost sides of the Octagon skirt the edge of the upper river terrace on which it is built. Views down over the narrow lower terrace and into Raccoon Creek remind us how carefully the ancients sited their monumental geometric earthworks, on perfectly level, well drained gravelly terrain, safely out of the reach of erosion and flooding. The eastern, somewhat overgrown gateway of the Octagon touches the modern road; the southern opens to a small stretch of grass that also contains an exquisite small circular enclosure. This is one of many that accompanied the Newark Earthworks, as recorded on 19th century plans.

The Great Hopewell Road: From near this small circle, remnants of other low embankments are the beginnings of a long straight roadway that headed off to the southwest. Early maps show these continuing as perfectly straight parallel lines, about 180 feet apart and about 3 feet high, for at least six miles. If indeed this monumental pathway, as wide as a modern interstate highway, continued at this angle for sixty miles, as Dr. Bradley Lepper has suggested is possible, it would have arrived exactly at Chillicothe, the other major Hopewell-era cultural center. Small traces survive in patches of woods south of town; several more segments have been confirmed on aerial photos from the 1930s.

Hilltop Views: The Newark Earthwork complex was so large, and so level, and designed with such precision, it begs the question of how its builders meant to see, appreciate, use, or understand it. Vantage points both high enough and close enough from which the whole arrangement might have been visible, are rare and difficult to reach. One is from a steep bluff above the South Fork of the Licking River (visible from the Great Circle parking lot), now in an undeveloped park owned by the neighboring town of Heath, which may be open to the public in the near future. Hively and Horn, and archaeologist Bill Romain, have recently been discovering complex relationships among the geometries and alignments of the earthworks themselves with the positions of prominent hills and ravines surrounding the site. This new research suggests that lunar and solar alignments also exist at a much larger scale in this overall sacred landscape, and that the ancients may have included these distant views among their design intentions.

Eating and Sleeping: On the Courthouse Square in Newark are the Dal Cielo and the Natoma restaurants. Conveniently located around the corner is the Place Off the Square (a modern inn affiliated with the famed Longaberger Basket Company, at 50 North Second Street; 740 322 6455). Many chain locations for food and lodging are positioned along SR 79 in Heath, heading south from the Great Circle.

Further information on what to see and do in the vicinity is available from the Greater Licking County Convention and Visitors Bureau: http://www.lccvb.com.