10/09/2026
Here is an interesting read about our favorite cemetery!
📌 Riverview Cemetery Mound — Aurora, Indiana
📍 39°01′37.84″N 84°53′12.35″W
A much older burial landscape sits quietly inside a 19th-century one, hidden among the graves and curving drives of River View Cemetery.
Hidden among the graves and winding roads of River View Cemetery near Aurora, Indiana, is a much older feature of the landscape, a large earthen mound overlooking the Ohio River. The mound is recorded in historical accounts of the prehistoric earthworks of Dearborn County, an area where numerous mounds were documented during the 1800s. The History of Dearborn and Ohio Counties, Indiana, published in 1885, reported a number of mounds around Aurora, including a large mound within the city that had already been substantially damaged by construction.
The same account described an impressive concentration farther west along Laughery Creek. Dr. J. B. Gerard and others excavated a mound near the mouth of the creek measuring roughly 100 feet in diameter and 15 feet high, where they reportedly encountered human remains, an intact earthen vessel, and numerous pottery fragments. Gerard also reported seeing 20 to 30 mounds along the bluffs of Laughery Creek.
The historical source identifies the mound at River View Cemetery separately, noting that additional conical mounds had been described in local histories and that the "Riverview Cemetery mound is located on high ground overlooking the Ohio River."
River View Cemetery itself came much later. It was established in 1869 and designed by architect William Tinsley in the picturesque rural-cemetery tradition, with rolling lawns, curving drives, and radial arrangements of graves. The original cemetery covered approximately 30 acres and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2013.
That later landscaping is what makes the LiDAR here particularly interesting. In ordinary aerial imagery, the rise blends naturally into the cemetery's rolling terrain and circular road system. LiDAR removes the trees and visual clutter and makes the topography much easier to examine, revealing the prominent rounded elevation surrounded today by graves and cemetery drives.
What I wouldn't do is assign this mound to the Adena, Hopewell, or any other specific archaeological culture without stronger documentation. The historical material identifies it as a mound, but doesn't establish who built it or precisely when.
The larger setting, though, is remarkable. This part of southeastern Indiana overlooks the Ohio River and Laughery Creek, within a landscape where 19th-century observers documented numerous Indigenous earthworks, many of which were later excavated, damaged, or destroyed as Aurora and the surrounding countryside developed.
Today the Riverview Cemetery mound survives within another burial landscape created centuries later, an ancient earthen feature surrounded by the graves and monuments of a cemetery established in the 1800s.
