LOOSE THREADS IN A TAPESTRY OF STONE: THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE NEWPORT TOWER SUZANNE CARLSON The rough stone tower, a clumsy roofless cylinder, propped on eight sturdy but ungraceful legs topped by irregular stone arches, and pierced by an odd array of windows, niches and random holes, was just one stop on the occasional outing to Newport by overworked architectural students from the Rhode island School of Design. This curio reminded one student, me, of the demolished replica remembered from my childhood in Worcester, Massachusetts. Abandoned to the perimeter of a growing repertoire of memorable structures, Newport Tower was forgotten for twenty-five years. During a later European outing, that included the round church at Lanleff, Brittany, Patrick Ferryn suggested I write something about the architecture of that unusual structure and compare it with the Newport Tower. It seemed like a good idea. I was, and still am, a practicing architect specializing in historic preservation. A love of old buildings, nurtured during my student days in Italy, has led me along the highways and byways of Europe from Iceland to Portugal, from the Orkney Islands to the Aegean, as an ardent student of architectural curiosities. Back home, the day to day confrontation with the building styles and techniques of early New England offered a good basis for evaluating the various waves of theories accounting for this unlikely Newport ruin, which has captured the imagination of many for over two centuries. This is a stopping point on a fascinating quest leading down unexpected paths and allusive trails and I invite you to share my adventure. INTRODUCTION Only a rugged stone apse, its back braced against the wind and Atlantic waves, remains of the early Medieval Norse round church of Orphir on the west coast of the Orkney Islands. The puzzling arcaded round church in the village of Lanleff in northern Brittany purports to be a Templar sanctuary, but its style betrays a construction date before the founding of that religious order. The octagonal tower in the abandoned Monastery of Saint Bavo in Ghent hides its upper story above a stone groined vault. The Knights of the Order of Christ chose the octagon for their altar tower in the Templar convent in Tomar, Portugal. Both of the twin towers on the grounds of the Sulpician Grand Seminary in Montreal, Canada features a fireplace with a flue exiting on the side wall, while the other has two fireplaces with the same unusual flue arrangement.Sir Edward Peyto’s elegant open-arcaded, round windmill dominates the rolling hills around Chesterton in Warwickshire, England. All of these buildings have been suggested as the inspiration or even prototype for the Newport Tower (FIGURE 1). Ranging in style from rude and rugged to the gracious Renaissance work of Inigo Jones, these buildings have more in common than circles and arches. Whether built in the eleventh century or the seventeenth, they would have been constructed with the same tools, the same brute strength of the workmen who spent the same amount of time preparing and completing the construction, and struggling with many of the same technical problems. FIGURE 1. BIRDS EYE VIEW OF NEWPORT TOWER. JAMES EGAN The Newport Tower Arnold to Zeno 5 But there were differences in Newport. Though perched a Viking prince and the tower, his lady’s bower.4 Partisans high above a protected bay, this Tower’s builder was on the for the Norse theory grew in number, encouraged by the wrong side of the wide Atlantic. In this investigation, I fol- unearthing of the Kensington (Minnesota) rune stone in low in the wake of a long line of worthy researchers on both 1898. Journalist Hjalmar Holland, who had dedicated his sides of the ocean whose imaginations have been fired by the life proving the authenticity of the Kensington stone, took up enigmatic icon in Newport’s Touro Park. the banner for Newport. The proper Bostonians entered the It was generally assumed that the early settler and first fray in 1877 with Eben Horsford joining Longfellow, Edward Rhode Island governor, Benedict Arnold, built the tower in Everett Hale, Lowell, Whittier and Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1675 “from the ground up” to serve as a windmill for the in supporting the Norwegian Ole Bull on the pro-Norse side. 1 Horsford and his daughter Cornelia continued carrying the fledgling community of Newport. The contention is that he 5 patterned his mill after a windmill near his childhood home Viking torch, which was passed on to Frederick Pohl. After near Chesterton, England. This theory was fortified in 1847 by an early round of not-so-literary brawls, the Arnoldist side the discovery of David Melville, a rabid Arnoldist, of a picture became more entrenched. Proponents (including a bevy from the Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of minor historians) during the 1870s and 80s returned to of Useful Knowledge (1836) of the windmill at Chesterton. the assertions made in 1858 by John G. Palfrey in his His- An alternate proposal had made its debut in 1837 when Carl tory of New England which, however weakly (according to Christian Rafn, Danish archaeologist, Means), provided evidence for colonial scholar, professor and Royal Counselor, It was generally assumed that the construction. who possessed a formidable knowledge early settler and first Rhode Is- More theories began to crop up. Dur- of the repertoire of old Norse literature, land governor, Benedict Arnold, ing the early part of this century, Edmund produced his Antiquae Vinlandicum. He built the tower in 1675… Delebarre’s detailed study of the Dighton presented a forceful case for Norse pres- Rock led to a Portuguese theory that had ence along the New England coast, specifically Rhode Island. its foundation on the voyages of members of the noble Cor- Rafn had been sent drawings of the Dighton “Writing Rock” tereal family. This theory hypothesizes that Miguel Cortereal at the mouth of the Taunton River,2 and, in collaboration with was shipwrecked in 1501 or 1502 while searching for his lost scholar and runologist Finn Magnussen, had concluded that brother Gaspar in Narragansett Bay and built the tower as a there was indeed written on the rock THORFINN3 in the runic beacon to alert long awaited rescuers from home. letters of the eleventh century. This led to the conclusion that The first century of debate culminated with the publica- the nearby tower in Newport must have also been a product tion of Phillip Answorth Means’ book The Newport Tower of Viking craftsmanship. Rafn’s enthusiastic support of Norse in 1942. In my opinion, this publication was a watershed in presence in America set off a flurry of interest, theories, and compiling and assessing the evolution of the Newport Tower “proofs” supporting the Norse Theory. “question” from its inception. Means, whose background was The flurry saw a new burst in 1841, whenHenry Wads- in Latin American archaeology, leaves no stone unturned, worth Longfellow expanded on the discovery of a “skeleton first discussing the history of the conflict and then investigat- in armor” in nearby Fall River, Massachusetts, and embraced ing each detail of each argument in meticulous detail. He is the Newport Tower as the location for the melancholy end decidedly on the side of the Norse and, to observant readers, to his heroic, if mediocre, poem where the skeleton became eliminates any possibility that Arnold could have built the tower from “the ground up”. 1 The most complete history of the evolution of the different By the end of the 1940s, research on Newport Tower theories and their supporters is found in Phillip Ainsworth Means’ took a scientific turn. The city government and the local book the Newport Tower, 1942, Henry Holt, Boston. preservation society gave permission for an archeological 2 The Dighton Rock in Dighton Massachusetts was first noticed excavation in and around the ruin. A committee of the Society in 1630 by Rev. John Danforth. In 1830 a committee appointed of American Archeology was in charge of the project, with by the Rhode Island Historical Society sent a “facsimile” to archaeologist Hugh Henken, Harvard University, as supervi- Professor Rafn. sor of the fieldwork.William S. Godfrey was in charge of the 3 According to the Sagas, Thorfinn Karlsefni, Lief Erickson’s excavation with assistance from other students. brother-in-law, attempted to settle in Vinland sometime in the first decade of the eleventh century. After three years, the colony was abandoned and the settlers, including Thorfinn’s son Snorri, who is said to be the first white child born in America, returned to 5 Both Horsford and Pohl were primarily in search of Leif Greenland. Erickson’s quarters in Vinland. In the 1890s Horsford had 4 Despite the romantic and poetic treatment, the Fall River proposed a site on the Charles River, near Boston, and Pohl skeleton was later determined to be a contact period Indian buried explored, excavated and proposed a site on Follins Pond on Cape in a panoply of copper and brass plates and tubes. (Stapler 1998) Cod as the Vinland settlement. The Newport Tower Arnold to Zeno 6 The project lasted two years, 1948-49. The first year, of the heraldry discernible on the shield carried by what ap- a one meter wide trench was dug starting twenty meters peared to be a medieval knight. The arms of Clan Gunn were south-southwest of the tower, through an arcade opening decoded. It was claimed that James Gunn had accompanied and then through the interior. The second year’s excavation Henry Sinclair, Prince of the Orkney Isles, on his purported included the tower’s interior and surrounding areas excluding voyage west in 1398.