This is a story best told around the campfire because, in the dark of the night, it is easier for the mind to soar beyond the limits of time and imagine the people who once called Ohio's fertile Paint Valley their home. Let the smell of the wood smoke take you there.
    These people hunted the deer and wild turkey, paid tribute to the power of the bear and panther, harvested mussels out of the cold clear waters of the creeks, roasted eel meat and acorns over autumn fires, warmed themselves with the fur of beaver and elk, and in the dark of the cold winters, told stories and sang songs around the campfires. These people had the hearts of poets. They scribed immense near-perfect geometric features on the landscapes with walls of stone and earth, shapes so large they could be only be appreciated (enigmatically) from the air, sometimes large enough to contain a whole handful of pyramids. Inside these earthen enclosures they conducted ceremonies which ranged from astronomical observations, gathering the elders to breathe the sacred smoke drawn through native animal effigy pipes, to conducting the mournful and ritualized burials of loved ones, asking the same aching questions that people have been asking since time immemorial, "Why?"

    Their summer clothing included the weaving of intricate fabrics from natural woodland fibers, dyed in beautiful colors, and they adorned themselves with strings of pearls, combs of tortoise shell, copper earplugs, and perforated teeth of wolves and bear. They made art pieces of flint and, out of the Michigan-sourced copper they intensively imported, they made everything from musical pan pipes whose music resounded across these hills, to 28-pound ceremonial copper axes. They engaged in the high adventure of carrying exotic material to southern Ohio, the sacred center of their vast cosmos, concentrating their relics along the lower Scioto River and Paint Valley.
    They made long pilgrimages across the eastern half of the continent, with the familiar intimacy of a lover tracing his finger on the body of a beloved. In their land journeys they brought back shells from Florida, shark teeth from the Atlantic, ram's horns from the Rocky Mountains, and obsidian from Yellowstone. They spoke archaic complex languages that we will never have the gift of knowing as they recited their epic journeys around campfires in this valley, their home center, to their less cosmopolitan kin. And somehow this far-flung culture managed to, for a time, achieve the rare virtue of unity, finding inclusion among varying races over great expanses of geography.

    They were people who were truly at home in in the Eastern Forest. They knew this land and its living things with an intimacy we can't possibly imagine, from the song of a cerulean warbler to the smell of a muskrat to the snuff of an angry bobcat. Their art forms essentially arose out of power and magic of the animal world. The animals inspired them, engaged them, formed relationships with them.

   If these native people could time travel to today, they would never, never be able to comprehend what has happened to their land and to their animal kin. Between our two cultures--the modern post-European contact world, and the ancient world of the Hopewell culture -- is a chasm as deep and wide as only time and disparate cosmological differences could carve. There's a story here, and for the sake of our children and the world we bestow them, we should all make the effort to decipher the script.
 

    Here at the Arc of Appalachia Preserve System, we do our daily land preservation work in the very heart of what was once the Hopewell's cultural universe--Paint Valley. To walk these woods, ridges, and caves in this world is to walk in their soft footsteps. At dusk, from the ridgetops, when the sun sets, we can almost hear their dogs barking in the camp, women conversing as they hover over a fragrant fire, small boys laughing as they play, and, later, the rising swell of a single panpipe flute and the ritual beat of a drum.

    This is no idle daydream. As we try to re-member and heal the broken fragments of the Eastern forest to preserve the biodiversity of our land, we find ourselves trying to re-member the long silenced voices of the people truly native to this land. People who left art so immense in size that they used mother earth herself as their canvas, yet lived in balance with her fruits. We could learn much from these people.
 

    Larry, Co-Director of the Arc of Appalachia Preserve System  walked the 150-acre ceremonial enclosure on Spruce Hill and its surrounding forests scores of times in the six weeks of 2007 prior to auction day, spending hours there trying to "ken" the place. He saw many wonders during this short span of time. In March the place was quiet, clothed in drab colors. As he approached the vernal pool in the middle of the mesa, two woodcock bolted from the water's edge, while the giant shellbark hickory buds swelled with the promise of a coming spring. The previous night had been unseasonably warm, and the wood frogs and Jefferson salamanders had an orgy in the vernal pond. Most of the eggs made it safely into the water, but a few clumps of gelatinous eggs sparkled among the wet meadow's grasses and sedges, the impatient spawn of enraptured frogs.

    In April he saw carpets and carpets of wildflowers, some of the densest displays in the state: wild ramps, wild hyacinth, jack-in-the-pulpit, wood poppy, firepinks, rue anemone, dwarf larkspurs, and spring beauties, as well as three species of trilliums -- large-flowered, drooping, and sessile trilliums.

    Later, in May, as he was walking up the old ancient road to the hill-topped enclosure (more recently serving as farming lane and logging road) he paused to see a female coyote crossing his path. The coyote had just found a prize that apparently had distracted her beyond her otherwise customary wise caution - a black rat snake that she was undoubtedly eager to share with her pups. She stared at Larry and froze, evaluating his intentions with speculative eyes, and then, deciding he was a harmless old tree, she trotted calmly across the road and continued onward.

    A few days later Larry returned to Spruce Hill's forests to find the Puttyroot orchid in bloom -- he counted 54 specimens in all! And the rarer Cancer-root, a diminutive plant without leaves that derives its energy from the roots of other plants, these too were discovered in satisfying numbers, along with the diminutive and rare Adder's Tongue Fern. A week later the blackberries and black raspberries burst into bloom on the mesa top, blanketing the fields with clouds of white roses. Yellow breasted chats yanked yanked from the hiding place of bushes. He watched as a red-tailed hawk flew silently across the meadows, a rare Henslow Sparrow "hic-cupped" its simple call amidst the bleached out grasses, and two wood ducks flew from the vernal pool, whistling their eerie cries. Spruce Hill's 70 acres of woodlands were filled with the "we we rio" of the hooded warbler, the sweet tinkling calls of redstarts, the clear song of the red-breasted grosbeak, and a symphony of fluted wood thrushes, vireos, orioles and scarlet tanagers.

    Prior to auction day, Larry continueed his vigil of bearing witness to the vignettes of life that Spruce Hill chooses to reveal to him; hoping in this simple way to not only connect with the land, but to create a bond that will carry across auction day into a continuing future for this grand, solitary and once sacred hill. His dream was simple -- an enduring nature preserve where other people can come and follow in his footsteps, as he respectfully walks in those of those who came long before. We are happy to report, his dream is now fulfilled.
 

    Spruce Hill lies in the exceptionally scenic region river corridor known as Paint Valley on the northern curve of the Arc of Appalachia Preserve region, ten miles west of Chillicothe. The hill’s steep bluffs border Paint Creek as it winds through the ancient wide and fertile river valley cut by an immense pre-glacial river system that was once as large as the Mississippi. The Paint Creek River System, and its sister tributary known as the Rocky Fork Gorge, contain compelling scenery -- from limestone caves and steep-walled canyons to sparkling waterfalls.

    The mixed mesophytic forest of Spruce Hill and most of the surrounding hills, though relatively young, is densely canopied and is dominated by red maples, basswood, red and black oaks, sugar maples, tulip poplars, hickories, and white ash.  Like its sister hilltop earthworks site to the south, Fort Hill, the top of Spruce Hill is a flat-topped mesa. At Spruce Hill it is underlain by Berea sandstone, supporting a 150 acre meadow in which rare grassland bird species are currently nesting, including Henslow and Grasshopper sparrows.

    Spruce Hill overlooks a known site on Paint Creek, where the river curls around the hill's base, where an imperiled fish known as Ammocrypta pellucida has been found. It is commonly known as the Eastern Sand Darter, an interesting little fish that spends much of its life buried in the sand.