The round stone tower in Newport’s Touro Park has been interpreted as a colonial windmill and as a surviving trace of a much earlier transatlantic settlement. The surviving evidence is uneven: a seventeenth-century will names a stone windmill, real excavations recovered colonial material, and mortar dating favoured a colonial period. The controversy also contains an invented excavation report, exposed by a contemporary letter. That particular fabrication can be identified without pretending that every question about the building has the same answer.
A building and a historical question
The structure’s familiar names include Newport Tower, the Round Tower and the Old Stone Mill. It is a real standing monument in Newport, Rhode Island. The mystery concerns its builders, date and original function, rather than a reported disappearance or a single night of unusual activity. A suggested medieval construction date is a hypothesis about its origin, not an observed incident date.
In his 1851 collection of the controversy, Charles Timothy Brooks describes a strong local windmill tradition alongside Scandinavian interpretations. His introduction records the tower’s growing literary and tourist reputation. It also admits that confidence about the building’s age and purpose could exceed what the surviving documents established. Brooks’s collection is valuable because it preserves contrasting arguments and original correspondence, rather than presenting one modern retelling as the whole source trail.
The open arches and circular upper wall invited architectural comparisons. Those comparisons mattered historically, but resemblance is not a dated builder’s account. The same basic distinction runs through the debate: a structure can resemble a church, fortification or mill without that resemblance identifying who built this particular example.
The stone windmill in Arnold’s will
Brooks prints Governor Benedict Arnold’s will in an appendix. Its opening burial instructions place a family plot near the path from his dwelling to his stone-built windmill in Newport. The document is associated with 1677. It supplies a contemporary connection between Arnold’s property and a stone windmill, rather than relying only on a nineteenth-century family recollection.
The governor was a seventeenth-century colonial figure. He should not be confused with the later Revolutionary War officer of the same name. The relevant claim is about the older man’s property and wording in his will. It is not evidence supplied by the later officer’s biography or notoriety.
Possession and use do not, by themselves, prove original construction. Calling a building one’s windmill could describe a new building or an adapted older one. That is why the will is strong evidence for a stone windmill in the colonial landscape but should not be made to supply an exact construction day, a surviving construction contract or a complete account of every earlier alteration.
Brooks also reproduces later property language describing an old stone windmill and assembles local traditions in support of Arnold’s role. These records help trace continued identification as a mill. Traditions and later deeds have different evidential weight from a record written by someone who actually watched the foundations being laid.
The mill hoax
A particularly important episode arose from newspaper correspondence in 1847. An account signed as an antiquarian claimed that eminent investigators had dug around the structure in 1832 and established a Scandinavian connection. The narrative invoked learned names and an antiquarian society to give the supposed findings authority.
Brooks calls this the mill hoax. More decisively, his appendix prints Charles C. Rafn’s letter to David Melville, dated 4 January 1848. Rafn states that the alleged report had never been made to the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries and that the named Bishop Oelrischer and Professors Scrobein and Graetz were fictitious. This was a specific contemporary rejection of a fabricated scholarly report.
The invented names must not be turned back into genuine excavators by quoting the newspaper exchange without its correction. Nor can its supposed underground discoveries be added to the tower’s archaeological evidence. A polished historical story with institutions and technical claims can still be an acknowledged invention; the corrective letter is part of the same source collection.
What Rafn actually argued
Rafn’s letter did not say that he had personally excavated Newport Tower or determined its date. He distinguished the fictitious account from real communications received from Thomas H. Webb in 1839. He also said the tower had not supplied the basis of his 1837 work on early Scandinavian voyages: he had not then known of the building.
He reported architectural opinions based on transmitted drawings, but cautioned against deciding the date without examination on the spot. His preferred interpretation of early voyages remained much more confident than his conclusion about this individual structure. Those positions should remain separate. A historical argument for voyages is not automatically a demonstrated provenance for every unusual building on the coast.
Brooks’s introduction also questions the accuracy of drawings used in the debate, saying that rough features had been smoothed and masonry represented too regularly. Whether a comparison is made with a northern church or an English mill, an idealised drawing can make resemblance appear stronger than the building warrants. The book’s English windmill illustration is expressly labelled Warwickshire; it is not an early picture of Newport Tower.
Literature and the windmill explanation
Brooks includes Longfellow’s poem The Skeleton in Armour and its author’s note connecting an imaginative story with the tower. The literary treatment helped make the building memorable. It is not the testimony of a Viking builder or a record showing that a particular skeleton belonged to someone who constructed the tower. No such connection is established merely by the poem’s narrative.
Brooks’s own concluding argument favours a windmill associated with Arnold. It combines the will with a report that an earlier local mill was destroyed in the storm of 1675 and with comparisons to an arched English mill. He treats rebuilding after the storm as a plausible sequence. That is a reasoned historical reconstruction, not an entry in a surviving construction diary.
The value of the collection is therefore partly methodological. It preserves a legal document, a correction of a hoax, architectural arguments, recollections and poetry in one volume. Those materials answer different questions. Reading only their most dramatic passages would erase the distinctions that make the controversy intelligible.
The real excavations
William S. Godfrey Jr.’s 1951 account of excavations undertaken in 1948–1949 reports a circular construction trench and stone foundations capped with mortar beneath the columns. He describes undisturbed clay where supporters of a round-church interpretation hoped to find additional foundations. No such foundations, postholes or Norse artefacts were found in that examined area.
Godfrey’s dating argument involved finds in low deposits associated with the foundations, including a decorated pipe-stem fragment and glazed pottery compared with seventeenth-century material. The significance depended on their stratigraphic relationship to the building work. A colonial object merely found somewhere in a long-used park would not provide the same argument. His published account supports colonial construction; the particular excavated contexts matter more than a general assertion that digging took place.
Mortar dating and published criticism
An appendix by Jan Heinemeier and Högne Jungner, published in Newport History in 1997, explains radiocarbon dating of the lime mortar. The authors give a calibrated central estimate of 1665 and a 95% interval of 1635–1698. They considered a pre-Columbian date almost certainly excluded. These are the study’s results and interpretation, not a precise year visibly stamped on the tower.
Their methodological discussion acknowledges contamination risks, including old limestone that could produce excessive apparent age. Calibration and sample preparation matter to the interpretation. The quoted confidence interval reflects the measurement assumptions described by the authors; it should not be recast as absolute certainty about every stone or later repair.
In a 2001 critique, J. Huston McCulloch questioned sample selection, possible later repairs and processes that could make mortar appear younger. He accepted that the results were consistent with a seventeenth-century origin, while arguing that they did not conclusively exclude an older structure. He expressly acknowledged that his objections did not prove a date before 1635. This is published criticism of the inference, not an independent laboratory result demonstrating medieval construction.
Assessment and visiting
Outcome: Disputed. The colonial windmill interpretation has substantial documentary, archaeological and radiocarbon support. Published criticism challenges how decisively the excavated deposits and dated mortar determine original construction. The surviving material reviewed here does not establish a medieval builder or an exact construction year. The fabricated nineteenth-century excavation story is separately corrected and contributes no support to an early date.
The City of Newport’s current parks guide lists Touro Park and the Old Stone Mill as a historic structure. Public-place eligibility here concerns visiting the park and viewing the exterior. The checked guide does not advertise access inside the tower or supply visiting hours; neither is promised here. Follow current local signs and any restrictions at the site.
Location note: The map pin is a rounded Newport city reference from the U.S. Census Gazetteer, not a surveyed tower position or park entrance. The monument is in Touro Park; use the city’s park information for an actual visit.
Source trail
Brooks, The Controversy Touching the Old Stone Mill (1851): introduction at PDF pages 11–14; conclusion, especially pages 72–76; Arnold’s will beginning at page 81; Rafn’s corrective letter at pages 97–98. The title page, will opening and correction were also checked visually. The selected image is the book’s title page, not a reconstruction of an early tower.
Godfrey’s excavation excerpt, Heinemeier and Jungner’s dating appendix and McCulloch’s critique were read in the linked original-author texts or scholarly transcriptions. Only the relevant reported findings are summarised. The exact construction date remains unassigned in the incident-year filter: documentary, investigation and publication dates have not been substituted for an unknown building date. Sources, image rights, access and metadata checked 13 November 2026.
Visit Touro Park — Newport Tower exterior
City-listed park with historic structure. Exterior viewing only; the checked guide does not promise tower entry or publish visiting hours. Follow current site signs.
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