The State of Ohio’s Great Seal was famously invented here at Adena, where a view from the grounds opens onto a wide panorama of the Scioto Valley. That range of hills is now the “Great Seal State Park”. Roger Kennedy talks about the significance of this landscape:

One fine morning after a night spent playing cards, Thomas Worthington and a young painter were looking around for the place to immortalize for the Great Seal of Ohio. And when they came to this place they said essentially, “it’s a take.”

The sun rises over Karnak, and Stonehenge, and Delphi; and this is the Delphi of America, a place surrounded by an immense array of ancient architecture, telling us that people have been doing their best to make great work around here for at least a couple of thousand years.

The “Delphi” comparison suggests that, like the Greek site of that name, this was a place the whole civilization understood as the center of their sacred world, and a natural goal of pilgrimage.