The Alembic was a uniquely-shaped earthwork consisting of a circular wall of mounded earth, with two "tubes" projecting from either end, reminischent of the alembics of the early alchemists. It was larger than a football field, about 360 feet in overall length, with the circle about 260 feet in diameter.
The town of Sargents grew up around this earthwork; it served as a kind of "town square." The homes of two founding families of Sargents were built equidistant on either side of it -- the Sargent Home due east and the Rittenour Home due west. The Sargents Railway Station was just south of the work.
The Alembic was first surveyed and described by Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis in the 1840s; it was included on their drawing of the Seal Township works [link to the Barnes Works] as "Supplementary Plan N." Its walls were then about four feet high, but as the surrounding fields were plowed, they rapidly subsided and were covered.
Dache M. Reeves was an Army Air Corps pilot who experimented with aerial photography in the 1930s. Flying from the Wright Field in Dayton, he chose to study the prominent ancient earthworks of southern Ohio, and the N, as archaeologists called it, became one of his subjects. His stunning aerial photos of 1934, shown here, reveal that the walls were still plainly visible at that time. (Thanks to Bob Horne for retrieving the photos from the Dache M. Reeves Archive.)
In 1952, Route 23 was built beside the Alembic, intentionally avoiding it. The Atomic Energy Commission was not so considerate; they built the main entrance ramp to the atomic reservation clipping the Alembic's northwest corners. Construction of the ramp likely reduced the walls to invisibility. Despite the enactment of preservation laws in the 1960s and 70s, no federal agency advised the private owners of that land of the earthwork's presence, and so it was forgotten.
The Sargents Historic Preservation Project relocated the structure in January of 2006 and notified federal agencies of its presence in February. To date, neither the Department of Energy nor the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has acknowledged that correspondence.
Archaeologist Jarrod Burks Ph.D., a specialist in geophysical detection, has donated his services in mapping and surveying the Alembic. His map of the earthwork appears below.
To Squier and Davis, the opposing open ends of the Alembic, each 90 feet wide, suggested gateways to "avenues." Picking up on this suggestion, the eminent historian Roger Kennedy conjectured that this earthwork was the central waystation on a great ancient road that ran the length of the lower Scioto Valley. (Refer to Kennedy's superb book, Hidden Cities: The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilization.) Kennedy compared its function to a herradura or "station of the cross" along a pilgrimage route.
Evidence for this Great Scioto Trail is growing, for the northern gateway of the Alembic points to the two spectacular 90-foot wide rampways known collectively as the Graded Way. In what is now Ross County, the Great Scioto Trail would have connected to the southern terminus of what Brad Lepper has called the Great Hopewell Road, a wider and more recent sacred path that extended to the elaborate earthwork complex at Newark, Ohio.
The combined length of this ancient superhighway, from Portsmouth to Newark, would have been a hundred miles, making it the longest and widest prehistoric roadway yet discovered.