Field Notes Ohio

Ohio's parks, forests and wildlife areas with camping, the ancient mounds beside them, and the Buckeye Trail that links them. Stories, trails, wildlife, and where to eat and fuel up nearby. Book campsites on ReserveOhio.
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The Buckeye TrailA 1,444-mile blue-blazed loop around Ohio, with all 26 sections.
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Mounds & Earthworks43 ancient sites, including the Great Serpent Mound and the Newark Earthworks.
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Historic Sites39 places, from Fort Steuben and Zoar to Camp Chase and the Rankin House, from the frontier to the Civil War.
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Road Trips33 drives, from the Lincoln Highway to the Morgan Heritage Trail.
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Lake Erie Beaches20 public beaches from Conneaut to Toledo and the islands, with a map.
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Oddities & Roadside Attractions19 giants, ghosts and folk-art stops, plus a Mothman just over the line.
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Caves & Caverns12 show caverns, recess caves and rock shelters, with a map.
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Waterfalls34 falls from the Cuyahoga Valley to the Hocking Hills, with trail notes and a map.
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Explore Ohio

One map for every park, mound, historic site, beach, cave, waterfall and oddity in the app.

Lake ErieWest Virginia27 places277 places77 places73 places35 places519 places1913 places1319 places1916 places168 places810 places1010 places109 places98 places820 places204 places43 places3Barkcamp State Park4 places47 places77 places76 places69 places917 places173 places3Harrison Lake State Park2 places2Forked Run State Park3 places32 places26 places610 places103 places32 places2

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117 parks in 7 regions

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

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.

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

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
Check access
Managed by
Ohio History Connection network
Hours
Confirm current access with the Ohio History Connection before you go.
Admission
Confirm locally
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.
Open
Shawnee State Forest
About 12 miles · Ohio's largest state forest, with backpack camping and a horse camp.
Open

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