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

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second of a two-part series. Part I was published on Saturday, May 31 and can be found at this link.

Flush with excitement after his 1860 find of a mysterious stone with apparent Hebraic carvings in a Licking County mound, Newark antiquarian David Wyrick thought he had made the archaeological find of the century.

Armed with a translation quickly supplied by Kenyon College graduate Rev. John McCarty, Wyrick wrote to academics all over the United States.

But if he thought his find would be welcomed with open arms, he was mistaken. Almost immediately, the scholars denounced the find as a hoax, noting that the inscription mixed letter shapes and interpreted meanings from different eras of Jewish history, and it overall bore more resemblance to modern Hebrew than the ancient language.

Not least of all, the shape of the artifact bore no resemblance to anything ever found elsewhere in a North American mound, looking more like a vaguely Masonic design.

The experts said it was a crude fake.

Wyrick was concerned about this, but you can imagine that he felt much better when, a few months later in December 1860, he discovered another artifact. This was in another mound, once located near the interchange of I-70 and Ohio 13, south of Newark (close to the modern-day Dawes Arboretum).

This find would become known as the Decalogue Stone, because it featured a more sophisticated and accurate inscription which gave a condensed version of the Ten Commandments.

Surely this was better proof!

Afterward, a couple more items were dug up, including a small bowl. Wyrick’s confidence grew.

After all, his team had dug these artifacts from a much deeper location in a mound, not the shallow position of the Keystone. The Decalogue Stone was found beneath what looked like an ancient wooden platform, the sort that was sometimes found in these old mounds.

It didn’t keep a lot of people from scorning Wyrick and making fun of him. Rev. McCarty saw the ridicule that was starting to be hurled at the antiquarian, and wrote a letter to the Cincinnati newspaper defending his friend.

It includes the following passages:

“I was from home when the former stone was found in July, or probably I might have come more promptly forward in defense of the poor man whose intense devotion to the investigation of the antiquities of our valley, entitles him to far more credit than the learned world are inclined to give him […]

“A short time since, Mr. Wyrick opened a mound on the farm of Mr. Townsend J. Imry, about eight miles from Newark. He was attracted thither by its remarkable form and style of structure.

“The result of his investigation at this time, was a large wooden object – which he felt certain to have been an ancient sarcophagus – but which not a few of his very wise friends very confidently pronounced the remnant of and old horse trough [….]”

That kind of help probably didn’t do Wyrick a lot of good. But at least McCarty was able to inject some interesting ideas into the discussion, including revising his early translation, which certainly made it appear that he was working diligently on interpreting the stones.

Some scholars wavered, noting that the Decalogue Stone was a little more convincing than the first artifact.

Most were still skeptical, though, describing even the second stone’s carving as unsophisticated and the relief carving of a male figure stylistically unconvincing. It seemed to mimic known images from the ancient Middle East, with a man in a turban and robe turned in profile, but it didn’t look terribly authentic.

Most scientists continued to dismiss the find as a hoax. As time went on and the finds were generally rejected, Wyrick himself began to have doubts, writing in a letter to John Henry, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution:

“The Hebrew Stones I fear have done the evil. I wish to God someone else had found them than myself.

“The evidences figured here of the immense antiquity of these works, and that too long prior to the Hebrew or Jewish dispensations, has always raised a fear in my mind that someone has been trying to hoax me.”

These controversies and other stresses in Wyrick’s life took a toll on his health, and, humiliated, he died not long thereafter in 1864.

Many accounts of the case claim that Wyrick’s overdose with laudanum was intentional, but an excellent bit of research by Licking County historian Jeff Gill (in his blog Wandering Licking County) points out that all the local accounts of Wyrick’s death stated that he had long suffered from an illness that forced him to take laudanum for relief.

To modern readers, the descriptions of Wyrick’s pain sounds very much like intense rheumatoid arthritis. Indeed, Wyrick retired as county surveyor because of these pains.

Wyrick’s excavations were supervised by him, but dug by other volunteers. His death was likely a very early example of an opioid addiction overdose, not a suicide.

But there’s no denying that Wyrick’s public humiliation no doubt added to his stress, which could have very well fueled his rheumatoid arthritis inflammation.

A couple more artifacts were found after Wyrick’s death, but a local dentist took credit for these more obvious forgeries, and said that he did it just to prove how easy it was to fake an artifact.

He denied any involvement with the original Holy Stones. No one ever admitted responsibility for the original items, including the Decalogue Stone.

The stones have for many years now sat in the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum in Roscoe Village, at Coshocton, where they were part of the original collection donated by the museum’s founders, the Johnson brothers, who had purchased the stones from Wyrick before his passing.

For decades the museum took a neutral attitude, displaying the stones without commentary.

Unfortunately, there are still people today pursuing the line of thought that these stones are somehow authentic, despite all the evidence otherwise, and that the lost tribe was a real thing.

These diehards cite other, equally controversial finds in a handful of other North American sites. Those other finds likewise fail to convince most scientists.

Belief in the Newark Stones has retreated to mainly conspiracy theorists, never a good sign.

The believers point out that the wooden platform found in the mound has been given modern testing, which proves that it is, in fact, authentic to almost 2,000 years ago, and is not, after all, an old hog trough.

Of course, that doesn’t do much to directly support their argument, because the lost tribes left Israel around 700 BCE, centuries before that mound was even dreamed of.

It’s far more likely that the hoaxer of the Newark Holy Stones took his hoaxes and dug into the mounds where he knew Wyrick would eventually find them, putting the Decalogue Stone under a piece of wood in the mound to make it look like the wood came after the artifact.

While it sounds impressive, at first, that the Decalogue Stone was found deep in a mound, period accounts describe it as a rare mound built out of stones.

The hoaxer only had to move the stones, where he presumably found the wooden platform, then bury the item just beneath the wood.

An archaeologist today would immediately identify the perturbations of the rocks and soil, but such skills were yet to be developed by the antiquarians of Ohio in the 1860s, so the find looked authentic at first glance.

So, who was the hoaxer?

It’s impossible to say for certain, but Kenyon graduate Rev. McCarty is by far the strongest candidate for what is overwhelmingly thought to be a hoax, and a dangerous one at that, in the strained tensions of 1860.

He had the knowledge and was in the right place. As the priest of a church, he also knew the tombstone carvers of Newark who could have faked the items or even loaned the tools to McCarty to do it himself.

It isn’t even clear what ideology he may have hoped to push, if he was the hoaxer.

Various scholars argued for or against slavery, with both sides doing their best to find supporting material in Biblical and historical sources.

With the Decalogue Stone was found shortly before the 1860 election, it seems likely that the hoaxer was hoping to influence the election.

In reality, the hoax did nothing but muddy the waters, further delaying a better understanding of the arc of Native American prehistory and history.

Perhaps the strongest circumstantial evidence against McCarty was found by the Ohio History Connection’s chief expert, Dr. Bradley Lepper.

He has pointed out that the Decalogue Stone looks suspiciously similar to an etching in one of the popular texts about Middle Eastern archaeology that was available in the mid-1800s, Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon by Austen Henry Layard.

This etching, of a Babylonian carving, shows an inscribed arch over a male figure in a turban and robe, seen in profile.

And what is one of the few places in Ohio that would have had a copy of this academic tome, which was published in the 1850s? Kenyon College, where John McCarty was a student in the 1850s.

It’s not final proof, but it’s enough to provoke Lepper’s suspicion, and I’m inclined to agree, especially considering that McCarty would also have had contact with Newark stone carver Elijah Sutton, who made tombstones for Licking County residents, and would certainly
have been capable of making the Newark Holy Stones under McCarty’s direction.

Perhaps Rev. McCarty wanted to try to nudge history one way or the other. Or, maybe he just got bored running a small-town church, when his head was full of grand ideas about the ancient past.

At the very least, we know he had some ambitions, as his move to Cincinnati demonstrated.

But his own short time on this earth prevents us from learning anything else about what Rev. McCarty may or may not have had up his sleeve.

There’s even a chance he was the victim of the original unknown hoaxer, though his diffident “support” of Wyrick and his sudden translations of the texts are a bit fishy.

Whoever did it, I’m convinced the Newark Stones were a hoax.

While DNA may in time help us find more traces of the lost tribes of the ancient Hebraic diaspora, no evidence has emerged thus far to convincingly place any of those tribes in Ohio.

Common sense (and a lot of hard science) tells us that it was the ancestors of today’s American Indians who built the mounds, but the sophisticated empire that once created such structures collapsed, as empires so often do, leaving the grand sophistication of the past to turn to dust, lost on the wind of time.

What we’re left with in this case, are traces of a quirky and, ultimately, unsuccessful hoax.

Perhaps the Reverend McCarty would get a kick out of knowing that there are still a handful of conspiracy theorists who think the Newark Stones are real.

Or, perhaps, it was just a muddled attempt to support a political ideology that he abandoned abruptly after he discovered just how brutal and monstrous war is.

If so, it was the ultimate exercise in futility, convincing few and destroying the reputation of David Wyrick, ultimately leading to his death. If that’s the underlying truth, then it’s an embarrassing legacy for everyone involved.

And so it goes. Not every graduate of an institution is going to bring honor to his school.

Kenyon continued to list McCarty on their alumni list, noting his military service as well, and shifting him to deceased status after 1867.

It’s unlikely they’ll be posting a plaque in his honor any time soon.

Of course, if someone should happen to dig up an ancient plaque in a mound talking about how great McCarty was … I guess I wouldn’t be too surprised.