Tag: New England

Rhode Island’s Newport Tower

Here’s the Newport Tower in Touro Park, Newport, Rhode Island. The remains of a windmill built of stone in the 1600s, it’s sometimes claimed to have been built by Vikings (it wasn’t) or other alleged early visitors to North America. It was originally part of the property of Rhode Island Governor Benedict Arnold (great-grandfather of the other, more infamous, Benedict Arnold), who arrived in Newport in 1651 and died in 1678. The tower is described in Arnold’s will as “my stone built Wind Mill” and by 1741, it was already referred to as the “old stone mill.”

The mortared stone of the Newport Tower.
Statue of William Ellery Channing, Unitarian theologian, in front of the Newport Tower.
The Newport Tower is 28 feet tall.
The Chesterton Stone Windmill, built 1632, in Warwickshire, England. Photo is from the 1930s. Source: ourwarwickshire.org

Now That’s A Rallye

Tales from a short-lived road Rallye of the 1950s: A Classic New England Rally is Revived, Minus the Mud (New York Times article). Here’s the link to the resurrected rally: Great American Mountain Rally Revival.

“We were boggled they felt they could handle it without chains and backwards at a fairly high speed”

Peter Bullard

Free for All: The Vermont Archaeological Society and the Journal of Vermont Archaeology

The Vermont Archaeological Society is celebrating their 50th anniversary this year, and they have not only made  pdfs of their journal free to download, they have also made membership in the Society free.

The Journal of Vermont Archaeology has been published since 1994. In it, you can read about the squabble over who discovered Vermont’s first Paleoindian site.

Victor Rolando’s monograph 200 Years of Soot and Sweat: The History and Archeology of Vermont’s Iron, Charcoal, and Lime Industries, originally published in 1992,  is also available for download at their site.