The first Euro-American settlers arrived in the Conneaut area in 1798 and, as they cleared the land, they found evidence of prior Native American occupation. Early settler Aaron Wright reported a graveyard on his land in Conneaut, then called Salem, containing some 2,000-3,000 burials, and Euro-American farmers disturbed Native American graves and burial mounds there, reporting numerous bones said to belong to men of large stature. As published accounts were repeated, the details grew more embellished, and by 1844 and 1847 Conneaut’s prehistoric inhabitants were being portrayed as giant-like people. During the 1840s, the site called Conneaut Fort was first recorded and was described in Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley in 1848 from observations by Colonel Charles Whittlesey, who reported a dirt embankment around the hill’s rim, an exterior ditch on the southern and western sides, and two breaches in the wall, one apparently giving access to the interior of a village. The accuracy of that observation is uncertain, however, because Squier and Davis depicted Conneaut Fort as an oval rather than its actual triangular shape. In the 19th century, many people believed that burial mounds, ceremonial earthworks, and even natural features such as the hill known as Conneaut Fort had been built by an ancient race of giants unrelated to modern Native Americans, but such accounts of the Conneaut Giants and other vanished civilizations were based on poorly recorded data and a limited understanding of how to calculate living human proportions from fractured, incomplete remains. Some local residents and amateur archaeologists still say they have seen large bones and skulls in the Conneaut area and continue to believe the legend of the Conneaut Giants.