Saxon Petroglyphs

This drawing depicts some of the Saxon Petroglyphs. The individual images are not to scale.

The Saxon Petroglyphs are a series of figures of animals, people and other more abstract or symbolic images, carved into the rock that formed the bank of the Ohio River near the small town of Saxon, Ohio. The Ohio Historical Society archaeologist Henry C. Shetrone described them in a 1914 article in the Youngstown Vindicator newspaper. He wrote, perhaps with some exaggeration, that "Ohio's Mona Lisa has been found." 

The panel of petroglyphs included images of humans, a variety of animals, such as a bear, bird, turtle, and panther, and other, less clearly representational, symbols. 

The Ohio Historical Society made the decision to remove two or three of the most naturalistic images, so that they could be preserved and brought to the museum for display. 

William C. Mills, then the Society's Curator of Archaeology, wrote that 

"Many of the figures at Saxon already have been wholly or partly obliterated by the action of ice and gravel floes which grind over them during times of high water or floods.