Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park

Ocmulgee holds about twelve thousand years of human presence on the Macon Plateau, but its most visible earthworks come from the Early Mississippian period, roughly 950 to 1150 CE. Thousands of workers carried earth by hand to raise the 55-foot Great Temple Mound on a bluff above the Ocmulgee River floodplain; magnetometer scans revealed a spiraling staircase unique among Mississippian sites. Near it stands a reconstructed earth lodge, radiocarbon dated to 1050 CE, whose interior platform is shaped like an eagle with the forked-eye motif of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, with molded seats for leaders. A burial mound and defensive trenches complete the main complex, and the Lamar Mounds and Village Site downriver preserves a later, 1350-to-1600 settlement.

For the Muscogee (Creek) people, Ocmulgee is not an abandoned site. Oral tradition recorded by the naturalist William Bartram in the 1770s identifies the mounds as the place where we first sat down after the ancestors' migration, and the Muscogee made pilgrimages here. In 1805 they ceded lands east of the river but refused to surrender the mounds, keeping a reserve around them until the 1821 Treaty of Indian Springs. The park was established as a national monument in 1936 and redesignated a national historical park in 2019, and the Muscogee Nation's relationship to the site remains central to how it is interpreted.

Visiting

The National Park Service operates the park: no entrance fee. Park grounds and trails open 8 am to 5 pm daily; visitor center and earth lodge 9 am to 5 pm daily. Closed New Year's Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas Day. A boardwalk section of the River Trail was closed at research time; check current conditions.

Photo: [CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:15_30_096_ocmulgee.jpg)