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Eben Norton Horsford, the Northmen, and the Founding of Massachusetts RICHARD R

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Eben Norton Horsford, the Northmen, and the Founding of Massachusetts RICHARD R Eben Norton Horsford, the Northmen, and the Founding of Massachusetts RICHARD R. JOHN The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past — as it is to some extent a fiction of the present — the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology. —Henry David Thoreau, "Walking" On a grassy knoll overlooking the Charles River near Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one can find a commemorative stone tablet with a curious inscription. Here once stood a house of Leif Erikson's, or so we are told. The inscription is so authoritative, and the tablet itself so sim- ilar to the myriad historical markers in the immediate vicinity, that it has doubtless been taken at face value by many of the Eben Norton Horsford countless passersby who have paused to make it out. After all, so many famous people have lived in Cambridge at one time 117 118 Richard R. John Eben Norton Horsford 119 or another that it would hardly seem remarkable if Leif Erik- The Erikson tablet, it turns out, was the work of neither son had, too. Yet those with at least a passing acquaintance a crank nor a fraud. Rather, it was the gift of Eben Norton with the byways of early American history are bound to find Horsford (1818-93), an industrial entrepreneur and one- this inscription more than a little odd. Though there is wide- time Harvard professor who is probably best known today as spread agreement that Norse voyagers could conceivably have the inventor of Rumford's baking powder, an artificial leav- landed somewhere in New England in the eleventh century, ening agent used in baking. At the time of his death, Hors- there is no proof that their landfall was in Massachusetts, ford was among the eminent chemists of his generation. Yet much less on a particular patch of earth in West Cambridge it was as an archaeologist that he hoped to gain his most 1 on the left bank of the Charles. enduring renown.3 This curious tablet first came to my attention in the early In the last years of his life, Horsford became convinced 1980s, when I was a resident fellow at the Cambridge His- that he had discovered incontrovertible proof of the existence torical Society, which happened to be just down the street. As of an extensive Norse settlement in Massachusetts that ante- a graduate student in American civilization, I quite naturally dated the settlements of the Pilgrims and Puritans by more found its inscription intriguing and set out to discover what I than six hundred years. It was in conjunction with this dis- could about its installation. This essay brings together my covery that he commissioned the Erikson tablet as well as sev- findings. Intended less as an exercise in retrospective social eral similar commemorative markers in Cambridge, Water- psychology than in cultural history, it seeks above all to town, and the surrounding towns.4 In addition, Horsford explore why the idea of a Norse settlement in Massachusetts underwrote the publication of a series of lavishly illustrated 2 could once have seemed a matter of such pressing concern. books and went so far as to hire his son-in-law to erect a thir- ty-five-foot-high replica of a Norse fort, complete with a scenic overlook. The fort, handsomely restored by the Metro- politan Park Commission, remains in Newton's Norumbega Park, where, like the Erikson tablet, it still tempts the curious.5 Horsford's initial interest in the Northmen was spurred by a chance acquaintance with the celebrated Norwegian vio- linist Ole Bull.6 Horsford met Bull sometime around 1870 during one of Bull's extended visits to Cambridge, and the two men soon became close friends.7 As a Norwegian nation- alist, Bull took enormous pride in Leif Erikson — whom, with pardonable exaggeration, he hailed as a fellow Norwegian — and the two men spent many a happy hour discussing how the celebrated Northman might have found his way up the Charles.8 Horsford would already have known about the pos- sibility of a Norse landfall in Massachusetts, since local poets and antiquarians had discussed this theme for almost half a century.9 But it was Bull who persuaded him to set the record straight. Tablet marking the probable site ofErikson's house in Cambridge 120 Richard R. John Bull's inspiration furnished the backdrop for Horsford's first major foray into Norse history: the erection of an ideal- ized statue of Leif Erikson. Prior to Bull's death in 1880, he had worked tirelessly to build an Erikson statue somewhere in the United States, and by 1887 Horsford had helped raise the funds necessary to win the honor for Boston. Though Hors- ford had figured prominently in the planning of this project and gave the principal address at its dedication, he was by no means its only distinguished backer. The Erikson statue also had the support of a host of local luminaries, including the mayor of Boston, the governor of Massachusetts, and the poets James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.10 Notwithstanding this impressive base of support, the pro- ject did not go unopposed. Among its most determined crit- ics were the officers of the Massachusetts Historical Society, who complained that it constituted an affront to the memo- ry of the Pilgrims and the Puritans, since it implied that they had not been the original founders of the state. It looked for a time as if the historical society might prevail. Though sup- porters of the project secured the necessary financing to erect the Erikson statue near the heart of the central business dis- trict in what is now Government Center, at the last moment their principal backer withdrew, presumably because of pres- sure from the opposition. In the end, however, even the Massachusetts Historical Society proved powerless to block the installation of the Erikson statue, which stands to this day on Commonwealth Avenue near Charlesgate East in what was then the city's western fringe. It might seem inevitable that Horsford, having backed the statue, would soon throw himself into the search for possible Norse sites. In fact, however, he approached the subject in a decidedly skeptical spirit. In his Erikson statue address, he took pains to distinguish his approach to the Norse voyages from those of earlier Norse enthusiasts and heaped special scorn on writers who traced a Norse ancestry for such curiosi- ties as the Stone Tower in Newport, Rhode Island." In the 122 Richard R. John Eben Norton Horsford 123 following years, when he set about to investigate the historic- topography, artificial structures, to which description dating ity of the Norse voyages, he did his best to avoid making a back nine hundred years fits to-day, without a wanting ele- similar mistake. ment, cannot apply to two groups of entities. A little reflec- Given his background, it should come as no surprise that tion will satisfy the candid mind on this point.'"7 And all this Horsford approached the study of the Norse voyages in a he claimed, incredibly enough, to derive from the "strict con- decidedly scientific spirit. In his youth, he had studied for a struction" of the sagas.18 time in the laboratory of the noted German chemist Justus To test his hypothesis, Horsford set out to discover Liebig, whom Horsford credited with instilling in him an whether Erikson had indeed built his house on the site Hors- abiding faith in the value of hypothesis testing as a tool of ford predicted. As luck would have it, this proved to be rela- research.12 As a chemistry professor, Horsford introduced tively straightforward, as the site turned out to be a mere Liebig's methods to a generation of Harvard undergraduates, three blocks from Horsford's Craigie Street home. Shovel in including the noted logician Charles Sanders Pierce, who hand, Horsford strode confidently down to the Charles River, would later praise Horsford for having taught him how to dug a hole, and found a jumble of rocks. Here, or so he pro- think in the laboratory.13 He would apply an identical tech- claimed, was the site of Erikson's house. Horsford used an nique to what he was wont to call the problem of the North- identical method to discover the supposed site of the Norse men. As his first step, Horsford undertook to frame a suitable fort. Having deduced its location from the "literature of hypothesis; as a second step, he subjected this hypothesis to geography," Horsford wrote, he drove directly there and empirical proof. Should his hypothesis fail in a "single partic- found it on his first visit.19 Not surprisingly, given these initial ular," Horsford promised, he would not hesitate for an triumphs, he felt sure that the discovery of other sites would instant to abandon it at once.14 To this end, Horsford invited be merely a matter of time. And what a grand opportunity criticism, subsidized the publications of a number of his crit- this would offer the archaeologist! After all, Horsford exult- ics, and on at least one occasion formally admitted that he ed, there was not one square mile in the entire Charles River had made a mistake.15 basin that did not contain "incontestable traces" of the pres- 20 But how was Horsford to frame a hypothesis to test the ence of the Northmen.
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