This morning we drove north from Massachusetts into the town of Salem (not that Salem) in New Hampshire to visit this place:
This privately owned tourist site opened in 1958 and purports to show ruins of human habitation dating back 4000 years.
The ruins are somewhat expansive, consisting of many stone walls, several covered chambers and even a great stone ‘table’. Visitors self-guide themselves in and around the ruins, but today it wasn’t popular and we had the entire site to ourselves.
The guide sheet given out describes the notable sections, but is deliberately vague in certain details, not the least of which is how old the ruins actually are or who built them.
What is revealed – and to their credit they don’t hide this, although perhaps the language could be clearer – is that the known age of the stonework is about 200 years ago when a man (named Pattee) owned the land and built foundations and cellers himself using stones he personally collected. After his death his son sold the stones to a quarry, which left many of the structures in disrepair.
About a hundred years later (in 1937) the site was purchased by a man named Goodwin who had a strong belief it had once been settled by Europeans long before Columbus, and he probably rearranged and enhanced the ruined structures to better fit his narrative. And thus ‘America’s Stonehenge’ was born. Goodwin was not an archaeologist, and had no evidence of his beliefs (and there has never been any evidence of pre-Columbus European occupation of America) but this didn’t stop him from rebuilding the site to how he assumed such peoples would have used it.
These days the site has embraced the Stonehenge moniker quite a bit, and in addition to the original ruins has erected additionally ‘astronomically aligned’ stones in various places, as well as holding events on solstices and equinoxes. It’s all a bit mystical, as are the claims that parts of the site are aligned with polar directions (which I’m sure is a coincidence at best). There’s also vague allusions to rituals and mysterious meanings behind certain parts of the site. This feels like a deception to attract more tourists, and I feel the site would be good enough just focusing on the known history.
America’s Stonehenge used to be called ‘Mystery Spot’ but changed its name in 1982 to avoid association with those crackpot roadside tourist traps with ‘weird gravitational fields’. In the Mystery Spot era it was the focus of an episode of In Search Of, the infamous TV series hosted by Leonard Nimoy himself! Insanely, the episode (which doesn’t seem to be on YouTube) apparently claims the site is Minoan, despite the fact there’s absolutely no evidence for this! In honor of such madness, that’s me as a Minotaur above.
Before Goodwin bought the site, when it was presumably still in disrepair, one visitor was none other that Howard Phillips Lovecraft himself! It’s even been suggested the stonework influenced some of his florid prose. In his eyes, we could imagine, these cyclopean stones dug out of a field by a farmer not a century prior were antediluvian hints at a lost civilization.
There’s more controversy as well, about the spurious carbon dating, or the ‘sacrificial table’ or how the site was vandalized by a right-wing nut job a few years back. This is historical site that over the years has developed a history of its own!
Lest I sound too negative in this post, let me conclude by saying we greatly enjoyed visiting America’s Stonehenge. Although it was a bit hot, and every small flying bug in America was there to greet us, we spent an hour in real history, just perhaps not as old as some believe. And we followed in the footsteps of none other than Spock himself, and saw and wondered about the same views that sparked the literature of Lovecraft himself. I’m very glad we went.
