Hopewell Culture Administrative History

CHAPTER FOUR
Administering the Mound City Group

It takes good managers and a talented, hard-working professional staff to make park administration and operations a success. Mound City Group National Monument and it successor entity, Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, have largely enjoyed both. With a dedicated corps of park professionals in Chillicothe, the park's geographical positioning near the center of the state, close to the capital at Columbus, made it a natural focal point for National Park Service operations in Ohio. In the early 1970s, Mound City Group National Monument, itself already fully developed, served as headquarters for the "Ohio National Park Service Group," whereby all Ohio's federal parks answered to the "general superintendent" in Chillicothe and Mound City Group staff served more than one park. Known within the bureau simply as the "Ohio Group," the cooperative administrative entity endured only a few years.

The idea refused to die, however, as Mound City Group/ Hopewell Culture employees helped establish and augment operations as new federal park units came on-line in Cincinnati, Cleveland/Akron, and Dayton. Bureau reorganization in the mid-1990s created new opportunities for the Chillicothe park to shine within the National Park Service's Midwest Region and presented a real possibility of cooperation among Ohio's federal parks.

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