Who Built America's Stonehenge

Credit: Mike in New Hampshire

The site first appears in print in the 1907 History of Salem, N.H. It is described thus: “Jonathan Pattee’s Cave. He had a house in these woods 70 years ago; took town paupers before the town farm was bought. This is a wild but beautiful spot, among rough boulders and soft pines, about which the most weird and fantastic tale might be woven. There are several caves still intact, which the owner used for storage purposes.” 

The site’s history is muddled partly because of the activities of William Goodwin, who became convinced that the location was proof that Irish monks (the Culdees) had lived there long before the time of Christopher Columbus, a concept he sought to publicize. The site has been altered by stone quarrying and by the efforts of Goodwin and others to move the stones to what they considered their original locations, with Goodwin perhaps responsible for much of what can now be seen. Many of the stones have post 1830s drill marks from the quarrying that took place on the site. 

Proponents of a pre-Columbian, yet non-Native American, origin for the site argue that some stones are encased in trees that may have sprouted before the arrival of the first colonists, claim that there are similarities between the ruins and Phoenician architecture, and say that marks on some stones resemble some ancient writing systems of the Old World. The late Barry Fell, a marine biologist from Harvard University and amateur epigrapher, claimed that inscriptions at the site represented markings in Ogham, Phoenician and Iberian scripts, which he also called Iberian-Punic. 

Artifacts found on the site lead archaeologists to the conclusion that the stones were actually assembled for a variety of reasons by local farmers in the 18th and 19th centuries. For example, a much-discussed “sacrificial stone” which contains grooves that some say channeled blood closely resembles “lye-leaching stones” found on many old farms that were used to extract lye from wood ashes, the first step in the manufacture of soap. 

Carbon dating of charcoal pits at the site provided dates from 2000 BC to 173 BC, when the area was populated by ancestors of current Native Americans. In archaeological chronology, this places indigenous use of the site into either the Late Archaic or the Early Woodland time periods.

In 1982, David Stewart-Smith, director of restoration at Mystery Hill, conducted an excavation of a megalith found in situ in a stone quarry to the north of the main site. His research team, under the supervision of the New Hampshire state archaeologist, excavated the quarry site, discovering hundreds of chips and flakes from the stone. Both the state archaeologist and Dr. Stewart-Smith concurred that this was evidence of indigenous tool manufacture, consistent with Native American lithic techniques, although no date could be ascertained.

American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, an enthusiast for New England megalith stone sites, is known to have visited Mystery Hill sometime between 1928 and the 1930s. Mystery Hill is popularly attributed as inspiration for Lovecraft’s story “The Dunwich Horror”. Scholars, however, place Lovecraft’s visit too late to have inspired the 1929 story.

The site was featured on an episode of the American History Channel TV series Secrets of the Ancient World which aired on January 14, 2002, and in which Boston University archaeology professor Curtis Runnels refuted the theory that the site was built by Celts in ancient history.

In Search Of…, a 1970s show narrated by Leonard Nimoy, did an episode about the site, titled “Strange Visitors”. It was referred to as “Mystery Hill”.

In the Weird or What? TV series hosted by William Shatner, the “Human Popsicle” episode covered America’s Stonehenge and a variety of explanations as to its origin.