America's Stonehenge

On Mystery Hill in Salem, New Hampshire, about 30 acres of low stone chambers, standing stones, walls, and drains spread across a wooded rise. The documented history starts with the Pattee family, who farmed the hill from the 1820s; local memory credited Jonathan Pattee with building at least some of the structures. In 1937, insurance executive William Goodwin bought the site convinced it was the ruin of a pre-Columbian Irish monastic settlement, renamed it Mystery Hill, and spent years excavating and, by his critics' account, rearranging stones to fit his theory, permanently muddying the archaeological record. The site opened to the public in 1958 and was renamed America's Stonehenge in 1982.

Proponents of an ancient origin point to radiocarbon dates from charcoal pits on the site returning ages of roughly 2,000 to 4,000 years, alignments of standing stones with solstice sunrises and sunsets, marks promoted as Ogham and Iberian script, and the grooved four-and-a-half-ton granite slab known as the sacrificial table. Successive owners have mapped an astronomical calendar into the stones, and the site's promoters note that quarrying and moving that much stone exceeds any obvious farmstead need.

Mainstream archaeologists read the site as a 19th-century farm complex: the chambers as root cellars of a known regional type, the "sacrificial table" as a lye-leaching stone matching published examples on other New England farms, the carbon dates as evidence of ancient campfires rather than ancient construction, and the claimed inscriptions as natural scratches or plow marks. Goodwin's documented habit of moving stones means even genuine alignments can no longer be trusted as original. What neither side disputes is that the hill was heavily, deliberately worked by someone; the site remains privately owned, still charging admission on the strength of a question archaeology has answered to its own satisfaction but never to everyone's.

Open daily year-round except Thanksgiving and Christmas, roughly 9am to 4pm with last admission an hour before close; adult admission around $19. The site is self-guided along wooded trails past the chambers and up to the astronomical viewing areas; the small museum covers both the ancient-origin and farmstead interpretations. About 40 minutes north of Boston.