Lepper: Gov. DeWine is right; World Heritage Site designation would be 'big deal' for Ohio

Gov. Mike DeWine says it is a “big deal” that Ohio could have a World Heritage Site. Indeed, it is.

World Heritage is the list of the most important sites in the world. There are only 25 World Heritage sites in all of the United States; two of our area Earthworks would be part of the 26th.

In September, the 196 nations that constitute the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) will vote on whether to approve a new World Heritage site entitled “Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks.” This site designation would include the Octagon Earthworks in Newark and the Great Circle Earthworks in Heath as well as Fort Ancient, which is outside of Lebanon, Ohio and the earthworks that constitute Hopewell Culture National Park in Chillicothe.

Everyone familiar with the nomination is confident that it will be approved.

There is literally no more prestigious designation anywhere on the planet. The Grand Canyon is a World Heritage site. So are Stonehenge, the Taj Majal, the Acropolis and the most impressive pyramids in Egypt. They are the most truly impressive sites in the world.

World Heritage Site designation for the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks will bring visitors to Ohio from around the world. More than that, it will add Licking County to the textbooks and to the way our grandchildren understand the world.

Already grade-school children learn about Cahokia, a mound site in Illinois more than a millennium younger than our site that is also on the World Heritage list. Our earthworks will become one more reason the public understands that Christopher Columbus did not come upon an empty continent waiting to be discovered, and that ancestors of American Indians were not ignorant savages. Impressive cultures rose and fell here as they did in Europe and Asia and Africa. Here — in ancient Ohio.

World Heritage will be accomplished as the Ohio History Connection, which owns the Octagon Earthworks, buys back the lease to that site from the Moundbuilders Country Club. It is hard to imagine an alternative. The Octagon is the most impressive of all the sites in this nomination.

World Heritage designation is a statement that these are among the most important ancient sites on the globe. Can that statement be qualified to say that the Ohio History Connection, which serves our state as the central institution for preserving our history and teaching about it, leases the Octagon to a country club and invites you (as it does now) to walk around the edges of it or visit it more fully only if you visit on one of four days every year?

Ohio law says the Ohio History Connection has the responsibility to purchase important historical sites and make them available to the public. There is no need to purchase the site, only the lease. The city of Newark gave Ohio History Connection the deed to the site during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The country club had been occupying the site for more than two decades by that time, but the site had been purchased with taxpayer dollars years before the golfers began playing on it.

In 1892, Licking County voters approved a proposal to raise their own taxes in order to purchase the site and preserve it. Within the city of Newark the vote was two-to-one in favor. Jeff Gill argues it was the first-time voters anywhere raised their taxes to save an historic site.

Now the Ohio History Connection is buying back the lease. It is doing so for the public, in order to make the site fully public to the world at-large. And the United States government and all the other nations that constitute UNESCO will add our earthworks to its list of the most important sites on the planet.

Governor DeWine is right. That is a big deal.

Bradley Lepper is the senior archaeologist for the Ohio History Connection's World Heritage Programblepper@ohiohistory.org

This article originally appeared on Newark Advocate: Lepper: World Heritage Site would bring visitors to Ohio, Licking Co.