For his interests in Ohio antiquity, and enlightened race relations, Worthington was unusual among his former Virginia compatriots. Roger Kennedy continues:

He was a truly remarkable man. Not only did he set his slaves free as he came across the Ohio River, but he lived all his life in a respectful relationship with the Native Americans who were living here, and who had built those great earthworks. He had a strong sense from the outset that he was a newcomer in a very ancient land. He was not only interested in politics, he was interested in antiquity and architecture as well.

Worthington’s friend Albert Gallatin, whose glass-factory in Pennsylvania supplied the windows for Adena, also had high respect for Native America:

Like Worthington, Gallatin was an abolitionist and devoted to a respectful relationship to the Native Americans of their own time, and of the memory of the achievements of Native Americans of American antiquity. Gallatin spent the next forty years after this house was created founding and providing to the Bureau of Ethnology, which became the Smithsonian Institution.

The first publication of Gallatin’s new “Smithsonian” was by two men from right here in Chillicothe, Ephraim Squier and Edwin H. Davis, and was filled with Ohio’s spectacular antiquities.