A Closer Look at Valley View

I want to take a closer look at this unique place, Valley View, before we head back on the road. At first glance you may think it is just an open field within a valley with some nice woods along the perimeter. And if that was all it was well, that would be enough for it is a beautiful, quiet place teeming with wildlife and lovely sights. Birders, photographers, entomologists and those who appreciate spending time in nature would enjoy it even if they didn't know about the land's rich and cultured history.

Before Valley View was dry land it was part of a prehistoric sea. In fact, many areas around this section of the Buckeye Trail were part of ancient oceans making them great places for fossil hunting. One such fossil is the Ordovician Age brachiopod which has been found at Valley View and likely lived 443 to 488 million years ago.

To learn more about the history of the land, managers of Valley View asked Frank L. Cowan, PhD, RPA to complete a Cultural Resources Assessment and Management Plan on the property. Dr. Cowan reported that, "the confluence of the East Fork and the Little Miami River is an area of extraordinary concentration of prehistoric sites ranging in age from Paleoindian (ca. 10,000 to 8000 B.C.) to the Late Prehistoric (A.D. 1000 to 1650) periods."  ** From Valley View website.   

Fossils, arrowheads and more that were found on the property can be viewed on the Valley View website.

I have many memories of fossil hunting when I was a child and young adult. Fossils are abundant in this region and it is not uncommon to see small groups digging in the slopes along the highways, in creek beds and around old sea floors now exposed and dry land. I was lucky, as a kid I could dig a few treasures out of the retaining wall along our driveway. Consequently I forget just how remarkable it is to be able to walk in an area, bend down and pick up a fossil that was once a living organism millions of years ago.

Map created by Major Isaac Roberdeau

When reading about Valley View I was interested to learn that Milford was once the home of an earthwork in the shape of a bird which drew the attention of many, including President Jefferson. The “Milford Works” was located on land just above Valley View. General Lytle first surveyed the earthen work, bringing it to the attention of the President who sent Major Isaac Roberdeau, head of the Bureau of Topographical Engineers, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to Milford in 1823 to personally survey the site. In his report he writes, "the walls are earth, from 5 to 10 feet high, generally upwards of 30 feet across. No ditches."

Sadly, by 1882 Frederic Ward Putnam of Harvard's Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology reported that the square and great circle of the earthwork could still be traced but that their embankments had been nearly leveled by cultivation.