In Episode 383 Jeff Belanger and Ray Auger investigate an ancient stone tower in the heart of Newport, Rhode Island. Some suggest the tower was once an early colonial windmill, others believe maybe it was built by Vikings centuries before Columbus, or maybe it served a more esoteric function as both a solar calendar, or maybe even an ancient camera obscura.
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Produced and hosted by: Jeff Belanger and Ray Auger
Edited by: Ray Auger
Theme Music by: John Judd
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
*A note on the text: Please forgive punctuation, spelling, and grammar mistakes. Like us, the transcripts ain’t perfect.
[WALKING ON SIDEWALK]
RAY: It’s always fun to visit downtown Newport, Rhode Island.
JEFF: It is! We’ve been here a few times looking for haunts, pirates, and other weirdness.
RAY: Newport this undertone to it. Obviously, everything is modern with cars, paved streets, telephone poles, and things like that, but there’s also this very old seaport side that seems to bleed through all of the modern stuff.
JEFF: I get that. When you stand here and look around it’s easy to imagine a time where horse-drawn carriages brought you to the docks where a ship waited to sail you off to some distant land.
RAY: What brings us to Newport this time? Another haunt? More pirates?
JEFF: Not this time, Ray. We’re looking for an ancient mystery today. Let’s cross Mill Street and head into Touro Park.
RAY: Touro Park is a pretty spot on a slight hill in town. From here we can look west and see Newport Harbor below.
JEFF: What we’ve come to see is this stone tower here in the middle of the park behind the wrought-iron fence. It’s ancient, it’s original purpose is hotly debated, and it’s preserved here for all of us to see and ponder. We’ve come to Rhode Island to investigate Newport’s Mystery Tower.
[INTRO]
JEFF: Hello, I’m Jeff Belanger.
RAY: And I’m Ray Auger. Welcome to Episode 383 of the New England Legends podcast. Thanks for joining us here in Newport, Rhode Island, as we make our next stop on our mission to chronicle every weird legend in New England one story at a time. We’re so glad you’re with us. Most of our story leads come from you, so reach out to us anytime through our website. We love hearing from you.
JEFF: Don’t forget our annual Zombie Prom is coming up Saturday, February 22nd at the DoubleTree Hotel in Milford, Massachusetts. Tickets are $25 in advance and $30 at the door and all proceeds go to benefit Community Harvest Project. This is always such a great time. You can dress up as a zombie, zombie hunter, or go in your regular clothes and we’ll call you a victim. You can find the link to get tickets on our website or in the link in this episode’s description.
RAY: We’ll explore this ancient mystery in Newport right after this word from our sponsor.
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RAY: Okay, I’ve heard of this landmark. I’ve always heard it called Newport Tower.
JEFF: Yeah, that’s what a lot of people call it. Or Newport’s Mystery Tower.
RAY: So the tower is 28 feet tall. It’s made entirely of stone. It’s 24 feet in diameter, and sits on stone arches. It clearly looks like something used to be on top of the stonework but it’s long-gone now. It’s just a cylinder of stone.
JEFF: It’s obviously old. That part is clear.
RAY: Newport is old too! It was first settled by the English in 1639. The town grew quickly because people were frustrated with strict Puritanical beliefs coming out of Boston. The Puritans were trying to dictate every part of political and religious life for people in Massachusetts Bay Colony, and that drove some folks away. Some of them came here for religious freedom.
JEFF: We know Roger Williams encountered the same issues which led to him founding Providence for the same reasons. He had ideas about keeping church and state separate and the Puritans of Boston didn’t like that idea one bit. But back to this tower.
RAY: Right. As we said, it’s just an empty cylinder now. I can see some holes in the side of the stone walls of the cylinder.
JEFF: Yeah, those… They’re clearly part of the design.
RAY: Right. It doesn’t look like damage. It looks like small windows built into it with some decorative stonework around it. The one I’m looking at on this side is maybe 10 inches by 10 inches. But there are a few other holes in the sides of the structure too.
JEFF: Those windows are part of what makes this structure’s function hotly debated. Most people believe this structure dates back to the earliest days of Newport. So it’s centuries old for sure. Some believe those windows were used as a solar calendar. That when the sun shone through them it would mark certain events like a solstice or equinox. And there’s another theory that the small holes on the side served as a kind of camera obscura.
RAY: Wait, wait, wait. So this giant stone structure may have been a camera?
JEFF: Sort of. So the camera as we know it today got its start in 1839 with the daguerreotype. This was a camera that could burn an image onto a plate to be developed into a photograph. But a camera obscura dates back at least 2500 years, but probably longer. If you have an enclosure of some kind with a small hole in it, the image of the outside comes through the hole and is projected upside down and reversed on the opposite wall of the hole.
RAY: Like the pinhole camera we made as kids.
JEFF: That’s exactly right. And also like your eyeball. The pinhole camera is a camera obscura. So theoretically if this structure was full enclosed… say with wood that has long-since rotted away… if you were sitting inside of it, you could see Newport Harbor projected on the opposite wall upside down and in reverse.
RAY: Well, that’s a neat trick, but what purpose would that serve? I mean you can just look outside and see the real Newport Harbor.
JEFF: Right. There’s that. There’s also a theory maybe this structure predates the founding of Newport by European settlers. Maybe this structure is evidence that Vikings were here centuries earlier!
RAY: Vikings?! Rhode Island already has the Rune Stone. We did a story on that before. So I guess we couldn’t be shocked, right?
JEFF: Right. To investigate further, let’s head back to 1839.
[TRANSITION]
RAY: It’s the Spring of 1839 here in Newport. Martin Van Buren is President of the United States, and William Sprague is governor of Rhode Island. The War of 1812 is a distant memory. This experiment called the United States of America is starting to pick up steam.
JEFF: Folks in Newport are busy, of course. Time and tide wait for no one, and this port has ships constantly coming and going. Delivering goods and people, then moving on to the next port. The people who live and work in town don’t have a lot of time for paying too much attention to various structures in Newport, but a few people have caught word about a new supplement to a book that came out two years ago called Antiquitatis Americanae by a Danish scholar named Charles Rafn.
RAY: Rafn’s book was a hit because it brought to light and romanticized the Viking conquest of various lands. The public couldn’t get enough Vikings. They loved the tales, and the idea that maybe even these American shores may have been visited by these hearty warriors centuries ago. With Vikings on their minds, people are looking for evidence. Anything that might show Vikings have been here too.
JEFF: In Rafn’s book supplement he speculates that maybe this tower in Newport was actually a Norse church built in the 1100s by Erik, Bishop of Gardar.
RAY: Hmmm. I’m no scholar, but if this was a church it was pretty small. Maybe part of a church?
JEFF: Maybe. The thing is, there are some locals who DO keep track of history around here and they know a little more about this land. Let’s head over the town hall.
[WALKING]
JEFF: The building is just up ahead. We can check out the public records.
[DOOR OPENS / CLOSES]
JEFF: The registrar of deeds would be a good place to start.
RAY: Excuse me. We’re looking for some of the background on the old stone tower a few blocks over.
[BOOK THUMPS ON DESK]
RAY: Okay… Hey, check this out! It says the land where the tower sits was once owned by Governor Benedict Arnold.
JEFF: That would be the grandfather of the Revolutionary War’s most famous traitor of the same name.
RAY: Okay… reading more here… So there’s a record of the tower in the 1670s. Governor Arnold mentions the structure in his will. He calls it quote, “My stone-built windmill.” Hmmm so does that explain it? Would there have been a windmill on top of the stonework?
JEFF: That’s one theory. Some suggest there used to be a wooden windmill on that hill that was lost in a hurricane, so a stronger stone windmill was built by Arnold to replace it. But there’s another suggestion that maybe the tower was a harbor lookout of some kind.
RAY: You would have a great view of the water from the top for sure.
JEFF: Some believe it was an older tower that was then converted into a windmill by Governor Arnold. After Arnold died in 1678, the tower isn’t mentioned much for a long time. There’s evidence it was used to store munitions at one point. Most people didn’t give its origins much thought until Charles Rafn suggested it might be Viking.
RAY: With its exact origins unsure, soon other theories began to be tossed around. Some said it was Chinese sailors that built it. Others said Portuguese. Others said Celts. If you had a wild theory, you could find a way to make Newport Tower fit.
JEFF: Without a definitive document saying who built it and why, we had room for mysteries. And that brings us back to today.
[TRANSITION]
JEFF: In more modern times, archeologists have looked into this structure a little deeper. In 1949, a dig was conducted here that unearthed a clay pipe and some Colonial pottery leading experts to believe maybe Governor Arnold did build it. In more recent years some of the limestone mortar was carbon dated which also suggested this was built in the 1600s or Colonial times.
RAY: But what about the random windows and holes in the walls of the structure?
JEFF: They probably held wooden support beams that would have held up the windmill on top. But those holes also offer some insight into some unique solar alignments. For example, the sun can shine through two of the holes during the Winter Solstice. Is that a case of random luck, or was that part of the original design?
RAY: I guess facts like those keep the mystery alive.
JEFF: When you look at old drawings of Newport you can see this structure on the hill overlooking the harbor below. Check it out.
RAY: I see a windmill.
JEFF: Right. I think even the biggest believers in alternative Newport Tower theories know that it did serve as a windmill for a period of time. But they believe that it was something else before. No matter what, this is one of the oldest still-surviving European structures in all of New England. It’s about 350 years old. It stands here for all to see. It endures with just enough oddity to it to leave us asking questions and speculating as to who exactly built it… and why.
[OUTTRO]
RAY: Speaking of things that endure, we’ll hit our eighth anniversary this year! Eight years of the wicked strange side of New England. And we’ve also just hit After the Legend where we take a deeper dive into this week’s story and sometimes veer off course.
JEFF: After the Legend is brought to you by our Patreon patrons! Our patrons are legends! They help us with our hosting and production costs, with our marketing and travel, and everything else it takes to bring you two episodes each week. We can’t do it without them, It’s just $3 bucks per month and for that they get early ad-free discounts to our new episodes, they get bonus episodes and content that no one else gets to hear, they get discounts on our merch and ticketed events. Please sign up at patreon.com/newenglandlegends.
To see some pictures of Newport Tower, click on the link in our Episode description or go to our website and click on Episode 383.
We covered Newport Tower in the New England Legends television series. Episode 3 on Amazon Prime. Filming a time lapse and had to keep people out.
If you’ve got a story we simply must check out, please email us anytime through our website. Most of our story leads come from you! If you’d like to get more involved, feel free to reach out too! We’re always open to ideas on ways to grow our community of legend seekers exploring the strange side of New England. When you tell a friend or two about our show it helps a lot. So please post a review and share your favorite episodes on your social media.
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Until next time remember… the bizarre is closer than you think.
