When he bought this house, Sea had heard of a visit there by Abraham Lincoln, but had to discover on his own the reason the then-congressman would have gone out of his way to come here:

In 1848, when he was ending his last term in congress, when he returned from Illinois to Washington, instead of taking the train, he took a steamboat up the Ohio River from St. Louis. It became very clear that the reason was that Squier and Davis had just published “Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley,” which he read, and became fascinated with the different sites that they described. And if you look at his route, he would have had the opportunity to visit many of the sites described by Squier and Davis, including the Portsmouth works, and the works that were in front of this house. It was a little earthworks tour!

Lower Scioto Valley

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