Hempsteads Portsmouth Works Below is the third and rarest of 19th century drawings of the Portsmouth Works, this one by Giles Samuel Booth Hempstead, a Portsmouth physician. (Apologies for the orientation.) The date of the drawing is unclear. Hempstead claimed to have viewed the earthworks as early as 1806 as a 10-year old boy, but the drawing was not published until 1878 and did not appear in his own book about the mounds until a few years after that. In general, the drawing is consistent with the 1848 drawing of Squier and Davis and shows definite influence of their work. The principal differences are that Hempstead includes some small works not included by Squier and Davis, including a mysterious hexagonal enclosure in South Portsmouth, Kentucky. But the big addition is that Hempstead includes the hill northwest of Mound Park as a prominent feature, with numerous mounds and suggested artificial earthworks associated with it. This is the very same hill that I mentioned in my earlier post, which is at the geometric center of the equilateral triangle formed by Tremper Mound, Old Fort, and the Hardin concentric circles. Hempstead calls this Kinney Hill, but my researches yesterday -- principally by interviewing numerous old-timers at the Hill View Retirement Center on the north slope of the hill -- turned up a minimum of five other names, with Kinney not among them. The first pioneer name was Clingman Hill, Clingman being Kinneys father-in-law and an associate of George Washington, whose involvement in original purchase of that hill adds an element of intrigue. That name was ditched in the 1810s for Houstons Hill and then a long line of other unofficial names. Because of this name confusion, I am going to go by the name in most frequent current usage, which is Sunrise Hill, associated with Sunrise Avenue, which crosses over the hill on its west side. This, of course, yields another mystery, which is why a road would be named Sunrise Avenue when the view of the sunrise is in fact blocked by a large hill to the east. This at least suggests that it was the hill that was originally named Sunrise, perhaps from a Shawnee name. In any case, the Hempstead map confirms that Sunrise Hill is an extremely important feature of the Portsmouth Works, with a combination of natural and artificial features, about which much more attention needs to be paid. (Thanks to the many residents and staff of Hill View who assisted.)
Posted on: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 00:49:19 +0000
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