One of my favorite tools on the internet when I'm getting ready to travel are websites like Atlas Obscura and Roadside America. I love looking for and discovering interesting Americana. Cincinnati is full of them and so are the surrounding towns and cities.
On a recent trip to Hamilton Oh to check out the city's upward trajectory the first place (after grabbing a coffee) that we checked out was the Hollow Earth Monument.
From Roadside America: The Hollow Earth Monument is one of the oldest, oddest, public memorials in the United States. It marks the gravesite of Capt. John Cleves Symmes, a hero of the War of 1812, who later announced that the Earth was hollow with giant holes at the North and South Poles. While a hollow earth was disproven in the late 1700s, Capt. Symmes still somehow attracted a lot of interest in his ideas and even got Congress to vote on funding a trip to find and explore the entrance. The vote failed, of course, Congress may have actually had intelligent members back then. Interesting what captured peoples imaginations almost 200 years ago, some had said that the idea to place Santa Claus at the North Pole came from Symmes' theory because the Pole was temperate; people could live there.
The monument has lived a colorful life over the years, it has damage from bullets and other blunt instruments and the globe was stolen once. It was last restored in 1991 and raised up on a concrete column with brass plates repeating the slowly fading etching above them.
The former cemetery now turned Ludlow Park has seen better times but if you're in downtown Hamilton at any point it is worth a short couple block side trip to check out.
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