Field NotesOhio

Tremper Mound

West Portsmouth · Scioto County · Southern Ohio

The animal that turned out to be a house

National Register of Historic PlacesOnce thought an effigy

Directions →Official source →

Once mapped as an animal effigy alongside Serpent Mound, it turned out to be the footprint of a burned ceremonial building.

Shape: An irregular mound in the center of a flattened oval enclosure
Enclosure: 480 feet by 407 feet, with an opening in the southwest
Height: About 8 feet
Age: Built late in the first century BCE, early in the Hopewell era
Excavated: 1915 by William C. Mills of the Ohio Historical Society
Location: About five miles north of Portsmouth, on a plateau above the Scioto River

The story

Tremper Mound stands on a plateau above the Scioto River about five miles north of Portsmouth. The survey drawn by Charles Whittlesey, published by Squier and Davis in 1848, showed an irregular mound inside an oval wall and labeled it an animal effigy, a companion to Serpent Mound in neighboring Adams County. Some people suggested it was a tapir or even an elephant.

William C. Mills excavated it in 1915 and settled the question. Under the mound he found postmolds outlining a wooden building 200 feet long and 100 feet wide with several chambers at the east end. The 'animal' was the footprint of a large ceremonial house that had been burned and buried. In one of the chambers were more than 500 objects deliberately broken and left, including 136 smoking pipes, 90 of them carved as animals.

Related sites

Visiting information you can trust

Content last reviewed: September 2026 — this is when Field Notes Ohio's content was last checked, not a live status.
Primary official source: Official page
Location confidence: Verified entrance or visitor center
Published coordinates
Check current conditions: Official conditions or closures
Reservations or tickets: Tickets or admission info

Prices, hours, closures, campsite availability and trail conditions shown elsewhere on this page are not live — always confirm with the official source before you go.

The Elephant That Wasn't

For decades people looked at the odd shape of Tremper Mound and saw an animal, and the guesses got wilder. It was a tapir. It was an elephant, some said, though neither lived in North America when the mound was built. Squier and Davis put it on their map as an animal effigy, the kind of thing that made a neat pair with the Serpent Mound.

Then a dig in 1915 found that the mound was hiding a building.

Behind the legend

Mills found the outline of a large multi-room wooden structure, burned and then covered by earth, and archaeologists have generally concluded that the mound's shape simply mirrors the shape of that building. Inside was a cache of more than 500 broken objects, an exceptional cache of Hopewell effigy pipes, many of them carved as animals. So there were animals at Tremper, just not in the mound's outline.

The neighboring Portsmouth Earthworks have almost entirely disappeared under the city, which makes Tremper one of the few visible reminders of the Hopewell in the lower Scioto Valley.

If you go

Read the Scioto Historical page on the mound and the pipes before you go. If you can, see the artifacts at the Southern Ohio Museum in Portsmouth and the Ohio History Center in Columbus.

Visiting

Status

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Managed by

Ohio History Connection network

Hours

Confirm current access with the Ohio History Connection before you go.

Admission

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Please note

Please treat the site as a burial ground and stay off the mound.

Official information →Directions

Parks nearby

Shawnee State Park

About 11 miles · Shawnee State Park, the lodge and campground on the Little Smokies.

Shawnee State Forest

About 12 miles · Ohio's largest state forest, with backpack camping and a horse camp.

Details last checked 2026-09-22. Confirm hours and prices before you go.

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