Campbell Mound

About this property

Shrum Mound is a Native American conical burial mound in Campbell Memorial Park in Columbus, Ohio, built by people of the Adena culture roughly 2,000 years ago. It is one of the last surviving ancient mounds within the city of Columbus. The mound was entered on the National Register of Historic Places on November 10, 1970, under the official listing name "Campbell Mound." Shrum Mound stands on a high bluff on the west side of the Scioto River, measuring approximately 20 feet (6 m) in height and about 100 feet (30 m) in diameter. The mound is bordered by an active quarry lake known locally as the McKinley Avenue Quarry, operated by the Columbus Division of Water; limestone was extracted there from the late 19th century into the early 20th century, after which the exhausted quarry filled with water. Beginning in the 1970s the city used the flooded quarry as a repository for residual byproducts of municipal water treatment; as of 2026 the city has undertaken a large dredging project there, citing the site's limited remaining capacity. Access to the summit has changed over time. Ohio History Connection's own photograph archive, spanning 1929 to 1963, describes a set of formal steps leading to the top. More recent visitor accounts instead describe two unpaved dirt paths to the summit — a gentler route from the park's entry gate and a steeper, more direct route on the western side. The mound has never been archaeologically excavated, and its precise contents remain unknown. The Adena were among Ohio's earliest known settled cultures, living primarily as hunter-gatherers, traders, and farmers in the upper and middle Ohio Valley during the late Archaic and Early Woodland periods. They carved effigy figures, made ceramic pottery, built substantial houses, and constructed burial mounds of earth, stone, human remains, and grave goods on uplands near major waterways — a pattern consistent with Shrum Mound's position above the Scioto. Sources vary somewhat on the precise dating of the culture: Ohio History Connection's own visitor materials and the on-site historical markers place it at roughly 800 BC to AD 100, while Ohio History Connection's separate Ohio Memory photograph archive and the Ancient Ohio Trail project instead give a range of roughly 500 BC to AD 200. Both ranges fall within the standard scholarly window for the Adena. The mound is named for its donors, the Shrum family, on whose farmland it once stood. Minnie R. Shrum, an educator, deeded the site to the Ohio Historical Society (now the Ohio History Connection) in 1928. This attribution is corroborated independently by Ohio History Connection's own visitor materials, its Ohio Memory photograph archive, and both on-site historical markers. An earlier published account instead credited the donation to Governor James E. Campbell rather than the Shrum family; that claim is not adopted here.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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