The site's original name was "Rowley Mound", given in honor of a Mr. Rowley, the property owner. Both spellings have been used by federal sources; different editions of United States Geological Survey maps use both spellings,[3] the United States Board on Geographic Names officially determined to spell it "Rowley" in 1963,[2] and the National Park Service lists it as "Raleigh" while noting "Rowley" as a variant.[1]
Raleigh measures approximately 20 feet (6.1 m) tall with a diameter of uncertain size, ranging between 80 feet (24 m) and 90 feet (27 m). Its precise size cannot be determined: the mound was built atop a small hill, and thousands of years of erosion have molded the two into a single shape. The mound was excavated at an uncertain time in the past, and the excavators recovered a distinctive artifact of a type of gorget known as an "expanded-center bar". Such a gorget is distinctive of sites affiliated with the mound-building Adena culture, which was responsible for heavy activity in the vicinity of modern Fredericktown — another Adena site, the Stackhouse Mound and Works, sits to the northeast less than 1 mile (1.6 km) away.[4]
In 1975, the Raleigh Mound was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, qualifying because of its archaeological importance.[1] Significant to this designation was its relationship to the Stackhouse site, as the nearby placement of the latter's larger earthworks and village site meant that a detailed investigation of the mound would have a chance of providing archaeologists with an unusually detailed understanding of the people who built it.[4]
