Part I: The Newark Holy Stones hoax had a Kenyon tie

EDITOR’S NOTE: Part II of this series was published on June 7, 2025.

GAMBIER — Knox County’s august Kenyon College has had numerous distinguished alumni, many of whom I’ve talked about previously in this column. It’s inevitable that in such a long academic history — currently at 200 years! — not every graduate will have brought honor to the institution.

Today’s question is whether or not 1857 Kenyon graduate John Winspeare McCarty belongs on that tarnished list. McCarty didn’t have a long career, and on the surface, it seems pretty quiet.

He was born in Ireland in 1834 and came to the United States at the age of 19, after his parents died. He seems to have come directly to Kenyon, so perhaps a scholar in Ireland had advised him to come here. 

He did a normal course of divinity studies, most likely spending much of his time in the seminary program in Bexley Hall. He graduated in 1857 and started work as an Episcopalian priest in Newark, in Licking County.

In 1861, he enlisted in the Union army as chaplain to Company S of the 76th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. With this unit, McCarty must have experienced the ferocious Battle of Shiloh in 1862, one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War.

In October of 1862, not even a year into his commission, he resigned and returned to Ohio.

He apparently got the position at Christ’s Church in Cincinnati as soon as he left the service, for by early 1863, he married a music teacher named Louisa Rosankiewicz, in Cincinnati. 

If it appeared that this new position might be the beginning of greater prominence for the clergyman, it wasn’t to be. He was struck down by pneumonia and died in Cincinnati in May of 1867, leaving behind a wife who outlived him by 43 years, and a child.

McCarty was only 33 years old at the time of his death. And that was the end of Rev. McCarty’s story.

Or was it?

We must shift now to the story of an enthusiastic Ohio antiquarian, David Wyrick.

Back during a time when most people regarded prehistoric mound structures nuisances to be plowed over, Wyrick disagreed. Wyrick saw many of them in his job as Licking County surveyor, for central Ohio was once a stronghold of the Hopewell and Adena cultures. 

Wyrick was one of the first who decided that it was important to excavate these structures to learn more about the original builders. Early surveyors from the Smithsonian Institution had come to Ohio in the 1840s and mapped many of the notable mound structures, but widespread archaeological excavation only began with enthusiasts like Wyrick.

Though their methods look crude today, they were an important first step in preserving this ancient heritage. They were the first active archaeologists of Ohio.

But there was a controversy.

While some scientists proposed the structures could have been built by ancestors of the current American Indians, they were largely shouted down by antiquarians of a less logical bent.

There were many people in those days who took a very condescending view of Native Americans. These people regarded the Indians as human degenerates incapable of having built sophisticated structures like mounds.

These harsh denouncers were incapable of recognizing that the dire condition of native society by the 1800s was in fact the result of having had their land taken and their cultures destroyed by the encroaching settlers of North America.

Some proposed the mounds were of Viking origin, while others said it was people from Atlantis, or a lost race of giants who built the mounds. Lacking the scientific tools we have today, many people accepted these as plausible ideas.

Many of these people were determined to see the Indians as a race of diminished capacity, for that justified the tactic of seizing their lands and moving them to reservations, an activity that was at its height in this period.

We now have testing that suggests the remains associated with the Moundbuilders are, in fact, closely related to modern Indian tribes.

But such testing was unavailable in the mid-1800s, and those who stubbornly refused to consider the obvious connection between the Moundbuilders and then-current American Indian nations spent a lot of energy casting about for alternative theories. 

The most popular hypothesis was one which just happened to boost the idea that Indians couldn’t have built the mounds, that it must have been done by an intellectually superior race. This was born from the notion that the mounds might have been built by one of the lost tribes of Israel.

The lost tribes were part of the diaspora of Hebrew tribes that left the Middle East in ancient times. The whereabouts of some of these refugees have actually been traced with DNA studies, including a population in eastern Africa that to this day speaks of their Hebrew roots and includes Hebraic words in their language.

For centuries, their claim was regarded with skepticism, though modern testing has proven it true. 

The popular idea in the parts of the U.S. where Moundbuilders left behind structures was that these monuments were created by ancient Israelites who had made it all the way to North America long before the modern rediscovery.

Some groups theorized that perhaps they enslaved the intellectually inferior American Indian natives to provide the brute force with which the large structures were built. Others argued that the Indians were actually just degenerate Hebrews, fallen from their former glory.

Okay, so it was a racist and intellectually flawed concept that was later debunked by hard science. What’s the big deal?

The big deal is that during the 1850s, the United States was hurtling rapidly toward a Civil War, with passionate believers on both sides of the divisive issue of slavery.

Another school of thought held that if it could be proven that ancient Israelites were present in North America, it would be proof that all the people of the world had a single origin, therefore slavery should not be allowed because we’re all related. 

That idea was pushed hard by many abolitionists.

All of these muddled notions were about to come to a head in 1860, and the fact that these “artifacts” showed up just before the 1860 election — with Abraham Lincoln running for president as an outspoken abolitionist — is also a mighty interesting coincidence.

Were the artifacts placed where Wyrick would discover them in an attempt to influence the election? 

I feel sorry for David Wyrick, because I truly think he was an honest man, with a noble mission of excavating prehistoric sites in Ohio. Unfortunately for him, he stumbled into something very controversial.

In July of 1860, while excavating at an earthwork structure southwest of Newark, Wyrick dug up the first part of what was to become the most infamous find of his career. 

His excavation team was working on a structure no longer in existence today, but one which once stood just east of the Octagon Earthwork, part of the complex recently proclaimed a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. 

The item they dug up was a small, polished dark stone, pointed at one end, and inscribed with letters. Wyrick was no linguist, but he had a strong idea that the letters looked Hebraic.

This could be, at long last, evidence of a lost tribe of Israel making it to Ohio!

Wyrick tried to copy down the inscription, but botched the job, and was unable to make heads nor tales of it.

But at that point, he remembered that he did know someone who would be capable of deciphering the letters, someone highly educated in ancient religion and the knowledge of antiquity: His local Episcopalian priest, the Rev. John W. McCarty, who had been thoroughly trained at Kenyon College

Wyrick took the stone to McCarty, and — lo and behold — McCarty didn’t need years or months to decipher it, not even days. In a few hours he produced a detailed translation which indeed “proved” that the feet of Israelites in ancient times walked the hills of Ohio.

Excited, Wyrick wrote about his find and sent letters, maps, and drawings to major academics across the country, including professors at colleges and authorities at the Smithsonian Institution.

If he expected to be patted on the back for his discovery, he was sorely mistaken. An academic firestorm was about to erupt.

(To be continued in Part Two, next weekend…)