Newport Mill
The Newport Mill ( English Newport Mill , Round Tower , Touro Tower , Newport Stone Tower , Old Stone Mill ( OSM ), Mystery Tower ) is a building made of rubble in Touro Park in Newport in the US state of Rhode Island . The building has given rise to numerous, sometimes absurd, speculations about its builder.
Building description
The tower stands on a hill above Newport Harbor in the middle of a small park on Bellevue Avenue , which is full of historic buildings from the colonial era . An information board at the park entrance contains a brief description stating that it is a historic mill from the 17th century.
Today only the outer walls of the building are preserved. The round tower is built from largely natural and unprocessed rubble stones from the surrounding area, which are walled in with a mortar made from shell limestone, sand and water. The structure is not exactly round, but slightly oval: one diameter is 6.75 m, the other 7.08 m. The tower is about 7.30 meters high, the walls are about 1.00 meters thick.
Recesses in the masonry for a wooden beam ceiling on the inside indicate that the building originally had two floors . The lower floor is designed as an arcade with eight open round arches . It is supported by brick, around 3.50 meter high round columns. Above this there was a joist, apparently made of wood, with a wooden floor . Remnants of it are no longer preserved. There is a simple, rectangular window on the upper floor . An open fireplace and several brick niches can be seen on the inner wall . The window is oriented so that one originally had a good view of Narragansett Bay , but it is now obscured by tall trees.
The Early Sites Research Society (ESRS), a private institution with the aim of researching pre-Columbian cultures in America, had the area of Truro Park examined with a ground penetrating radar in 2003. Two objects below ground level were identified in the vicinity of the tower, a large, flat stone slab and the remains of a wall. The tower was therefore not isolated, but there must have been other buildings there.
history
It is very likely that the tower was built in the second half of the 17th century by order of Benedict Arnold (1615–1678), a governor of the Rhode Island colony. His father, William Arnold, came from Leamington , Warwickshire , United Kingdom . The Arnold family emigrated to America in 1635, and Benedict became Governor of Rhode Island in 1663. In 1675 the wooden windmill in Newport burned down; Arnold then had a new stone mill built, which was based on the model of a mill that had been built near his home town of Chesterton 1632–33, which explains the similarity of the two buildings. It has since been restored with National Trust funds and a reconstruction of the roof and windmill blades have been added.
Arnold wrote in his will of 1678, a copy from the 17th century in the Redwood Library, literally “ my stonebuild-windmill ” (“my stone windmill”), which he bequeathed to his descendants. A 1776 contemporary map of Rhode Island in the Redwood Library, Newport, shows a stone mill above Newport.
In 1948/49 a team of Harvard University archaeologists led by William Godfrey and Hugh Henken carried out extensive excavations on and in the tower. Only artifacts from the 17th century (ceramic and glass shards, clay pipes and the flint of a flintlock shotgun ) were found. In 1992, a Danish-Finnish team of experts carried out radiocarbon dating of the mortar. They suggest that it was built between 1698 and 1735.
The speculation
Since the 19th century there have been numerous more or less serious speculations as to who might have built the structure. Some of them are summarized below without assessing their seriousness:
Vikings
The Danish archaeologist and philologist Carl Christian Rafn suggested that the tower was built by Vikings in his book Antiqvitates Americanæ , published in 1837 , in which the discovery of America by Leif Eriksson was presented for the first time . The theory was taken up by other archaeologists and led to countless comparisons with sacred and profane buildings in Northern Europe, including the Østerlas Kirke on Bornholm , the round church of Orphir on Mainland (Orkney) and the Temple Church in London .
Irish
The Irish monk Brendan is said to have traveled west with twelve companions from Ireland via various islands, which are interpreted as Shetland Islands , Faroe Islands and Iceland , to the "Promised Land" in the 6th century . This was the conclusion reached by the American cartographer Arlington H. Mallery (not Mallerey, as Däniken writes) after evaluating the Piri-Reis map . The theory was taken up and disseminated by Erich von Däniken . Däniken attributes the construction of the Newport Tower to St. Brendan or his companions and points out the similarity with Irish round towers .
Knights Templar
Andrew Sinclair, a British all-rounder and author of numerous popular science books, fantastic novels and short stories, claims the tower was built by the Knights Templar under the leadership of Henry I. Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, as a kind of memorial or landmark to prove their presence been. Sinclair, allegedly a member of the Templar Order, explored Greenland and the American east coast almost a hundred years before Christopher Columbus .
Portuguese
The psychologist Edmund Burke Delabarre (1863-1945) of Brown University in Providence (Rhode Island) came to the view on the basis of investigations of Dighton Rock , a 40-ton rock with mysterious inscriptions found in the Taunton River near Berkley (Massachusetts) that the tower was built by the Portuguese captain João Vaz Corte-Real as an observation and signal tower.
Chinese
The British writer and former submarine captain Gavin Menzies claims in his book 1421 - When China Discovered the World that the tower was built by the imperial Chinese admirals Zhou Wen , Zhou Man and Hong Bao , who had the American continent before Christopher Columbus discovered.
American natives
In the August 31, 1918 issue of the Providence Journal , Chief Strongheart, the chief of the Yakima Indians, claimed the tower was built by the Narragansett Indians as a place of worship.
Others
- The Newport Tower was depicted on the coat of arms of the landing ship USS Newport (now ARM Papaloapan of the Mexican Navy).
- The Newport Tower plays an important role in the novel The Red Rover (German title: Der Rote Freibeuter) by James Fenimore Cooper .
Web links
- Redwood Library and Atheneum website about Newport Mill
- Website about the Chesterton Mill with photos
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Mark Moran, Mark Sceurman: Weird New England. Sterling, New York 2010, ISBN 978-1-4027-7842-1 , p. 40
- ^ William S. Godfrey: The Newport Puzzle , in: Archeology 2 (1949), pp. 146-149
- ↑ Information page of the Rhode Island State Tourism Office [1]
- ^ Carl Christian Rafn: Antiqvitates Americanæ - Sive, Scriptores Septentrionales Rerum Ante-columbianarum in America , Copenhagen (Hafniae) 1837
- ↑ z. E.g. Frank James Allen: The Ruined Mill, or Round Church of the Norsemen, at Newport, Rhode Island, USA, compared with the round church at Cambridge and others in Europe, Cambridge Antiquarian Society's Communications, Vol. 22, Cambridge (MA ) 1921
- ^ Arlington H. Mallery: The Pre-Columbian Discovery of America: A Reply to WS Godfrey. In: American Anthropologist 60 (1) February 1958, pp. 141-152
- ↑ Erich v. Däniken: Memories of the Future, Düsseldorf 1968
- ^ Andrew Sinclair: The Sword and the Grail - Of the Grail and Templars and a True Discovery of America , Birlinn Ltd, Edinburgh 2005, ISBN 1-84158-396-0 , pp. 140-150
- ^ Edmund B. Delabarre: Dighton rock - a study of the written rocks of New England, Walter Neale, New York 1928
- ^ Herbert C. Pell: The Old Stone Mill, Newport, in: Rhode Island History, No. 4, October 1948, pp. 105-119
- ↑ Gavin Menzies: 1421. When China discovered the world, Droemer, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-426-27306-3
Coordinates: 41 ° 29 ′ 8.9 " N , 71 ° 18 ′ 36.4" W.