Vermont: Mysterious New England

The fine rocky beauty of Vermont, with its lush summer valleys of green, is easy to appreciate as a tourist, but early European colonists discovered quickly that the short growing season combined with soil less fertile than that in southern New England made for difficult survival. As new lands were discovered to the west, many early colonial-era farms were abandoned, leaving stone walls and foundations we can still find today.

Some lithic sites, however, do not readily conform to what is known of the farming and building styles of the early white settlers, and then we must consider earlier origins for these structures. The similarity to Neolithic sites in the British Isles is intriguing, and the apparent inclusion of astronomical events into the matrix of these structures is quite astounding.

In South Royalton, Vermont, a number of stone chambers have been discovered which are unusual or of decidedly ancient origins.

South Royalton, Vermont

(From Field Guide to Mysterious Places of Eastern North America by Salvatore M. Trento)

In the 1920's or so, a farmer plowing his fields discovered a stone-lined chamber, which surprised him greatly as the property had been in his family since the 1700's and no mention of the structure had ever been made. The beehive-shaped chamber has a flagstone floor and narrow entryway. No European artifacts were found within when it was excavated in the 1980's, but Native American tools were. No bones were discovered to indicate whether or not the purpose of the chamber was for burial, however the stone flooring would make it a poor structure for human habitation, conducting cold and frost from the exterior wall, and foodstuffs would easily rot for the same reason, so the beautiful workmanship, holding up as it has for at least several hundred years, must have been for some other purpose as yet unknown.

South Royalton, Vermont

Nearby is the "South Royalton" chamber, a site which includes stone platforms, standing stones and mounds. Although the Vermont State Archeological Office has declared the stone chambers to be of recent origin, the intriguing astronomical alignments and some cryptic inscriptions, including a checkerboard-type design, may belie that summation. The inscribed stones all seem to be associated with solar events.

A bit further south, in South Woodstock, is New England's largest known stone chamber. The entrance is aligned to the Winter Solstice, when the dank interior is lit up spectacularly by the rising sun. Chamber measurements also correlate to the extreme lunar rising and setting positions during its 18.61 year cycle (known as the major and minor standstills). A standing stone over six feet tall guards the entryway, and others dot the surrounding fields. No definitive proof of Colonial-era construction has been found, and certainly the massive standing stones do not seem useful enough to warrant the trouble to put them upright.

the Stone Chamber, South Woodstock, Vermont

Winter solstice, from within The Stone Chamber

For bibliography and further reading, see Lithic.

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