# The Newport Tower in Rhode Island is a pre-Columbian Norse or Templar structure, not a colonial windmill

**No verdict.** The documented structure is a round stone tower in Touro Park, Newport, known for centuries as the Old Stone Mill. A 1677 will refers to a stone-built windmill on the site; a two-year archaeological excavation in 1948 to 1949 recovered only 17th-century colonial material and nothing older; and 1993 radiocarbon dating of the mortar returned a construction window of roughly 1635 to 1698. The rated claim is different: that the tower was raised by Norse voyagers or fugitive Knights Templar a century or more before Columbus. That claim runs against the physical evidence and has been graded from disputed to debunked by mainstream archaeology. A handful of unresolved architectural and astronomical curiosities keep a fringe of the debate alive.

Category: Lost History & Ancient Mysteries · Era: 17th century (claims circulated from the 1830s onward) · First circulated: The Norse attribution was launched in 1837 by Danish antiquarian Carl Christian Rafn and popularized by Longfellow's 1841 poem; the Templar version was advanced much later, chiefly by writers including Andrew Sinclair in the 1990s · Believed by: A durable niche of amateur diffusionists, Norse-in-America enthusiasts, and Sinclair-Templar theorists, amplified by cable television specials; academic archaeologists and historians overwhelmingly reject the pre-Columbian readings
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/newport-tower

## Summary
In a small park in Newport, Rhode Island stands a round stone tower on eight arched columns, roofless and floorless, its purpose obvious enough to the colonists who called it the Old Stone Mill and puzzling enough to everyone since. Governor Benedict Arnold, an ancestor of the traitor of the same name, referred to a stone-built windmill on the property in his 1677 will, and its design echoes English tower mills of the period. Yet since the 1830s the tower has been claimed as something far older: a Norse church or watchtower left by Viking explorers, or a stronghold built by Knights Templar who supposedly reached New England before Columbus. This case file keeps two things apart: a 17th-century stone building, excavated and radiocarbon-dated to the colonial era, and the claim it rates, a medieval Norse or Templar origin. On the physical evidence the pre-Columbian claim is weak, and mainstream scholarship treats it as disputed to debunked; a few genuine architectural and solar-alignment oddities are noted as the open questions they are, not as proof of Vikings.

## The claim
That the Newport Tower was not built as a colonial windmill in the 1600s but was raised centuries earlier by pre-Columbian visitors, most often identified as Norse or Viking explorers or as Knights Templar led by the Scottish earl Henry Sinclair, and that its round form, arcaded base, and solar alignments betray a medieval European rather than an English colonial hand.

## Origin and timeline
- 1677: Governor Benedict Arnold of Rhode Island, in his will, refers to his stone-built windmill on the Newport property. The reference is generally taken to describe the tower, and colonists thereafter know the structure as the Old Stone Mill.
- 1837: Danish antiquarian Carl Christian Rafn, in Antiquitates Americanae, argues that Norse sagas describe real voyages to North America and cites the Newport Tower, sight unseen, as a surviving Norse building. The idea launches the tower's alternate history.
- 1841: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow publishes The Skeleton in Armor, a poem tying a Norse warrior to the tower. The romantic Viking association enters popular culture and spreads far beyond scholarship.
- 1848: The Rev. Dr. Jackson of Newport collects mortar samples from the tower and from the town's oldest known colonial buildings. He finds them of very similar composition, shell lime, sand, and gravel, an early hint that the tower belongs with the colonial structures.
- 1948-1949: A two-year excavation sponsored by the Society for American Archaeology, overseen by Hugh Hencken of Harvard and directed in the field by William S. Godfrey, trenches the tower inside and out. It recovers roughly 1,600 items, all consistent with 17th-century English colonial occupation, and nothing pre-Columbian. Colonial-era artifacts are found in the builder's trench beneath the foundation.
- 1951: Godfrey's Harvard doctoral dissertation concludes the tower was built by Benedict Arnold in the mid-17th century and finds no archaeological support for a Norse origin. The windmill interpretation becomes the scholarly consensus.
- 1992: Former British intelligence officer and writer Andrew Sinclair, in The Sword and the Grail, advances the claim that the tower was built by medieval Scottish Templars connected to Henry Sinclair, Earl of Orkney. The Templar version, later boosted by other popular authors, competes with the older Norse story.
- 1993: A team drills mortar from the tower's columns for radiocarbon dating. The results, published in the mid-1990s, place the mortar's carbonation, and thus construction, at roughly 1635 to 1698 at 95 percent confidence, centered near 1680, squarely in the colonial period.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The tower's round shape, arched arcade, and stone construction are medieval European, unlike anything colonial New England built.
  Evidence: The form has a close colonial parallel. English tower windmills of the 17th century, notably the Chesterton Windmill in Warwickshire (built 1632 to 1633), sit on an arcade of stone arches much like Newport's. Rex Wailes, the leading English authority on windmills, judged both structures to have been built as mills. A round arcaded base is what lets a post-supported mill mechanism turn to the wind; it is a functional windmill feature, not a Norse signature.
- Claim: No colonial document proves the tower is Arnold's windmill, so its origin is genuinely unknown.
  Evidence: Benedict Arnold's 1677 will refers to his stone-built windmill on the very land where the tower stands, with his burying ground set between the mill and his house. Combined with the colonists' own name for it, the Old Stone Mill, the documentary trail points to a 17th-century mill, not an unrecorded medieval monument that somehow left no colonial mention of its builders.
- Claim: If the tower were colonial, excavation would have proven it; instead the digs were inconclusive.
  Evidence: The 1948 to 1949 excavation was decisive in the other direction. It recovered around 1,600 artifacts, including North Devon and other English colonial pottery, clay pipe stems, window glass, and iron nails, and crucially found 17th-century material in the construction trench cut for the foundation itself. Not a single pre-Columbian object turned up. The stratigraphy dates the building to the colonial era, not before it.
- Claim: Radiocarbon dating of stone mortar is unreliable, so the colonial dates can be dismissed.
  Evidence: Mortar dating has real pitfalls, chiefly contamination by old carbon from limestone or by later repointing, and skeptics of the colonial date have pressed exactly those points. But the 1993 program used multiple samples and yielded a coherent 17th-century window of about 1635 to 1698, consistent with the archaeology and the documentary record rather than contradicting them. Three independent lines, artifacts, documents, and radiocarbon, converge on the same century.
- Claim: The tower's windows align with the sun on the solstices and with stars, proof of a sophisticated pre-Columbian observatory.
  Evidence: A round building with several openings will inevitably produce some light-and-shadow effects, and observers note a beam reaching an interior stone around the winter solstice. But such alignments are easy to find after the fact in any structure with multiple windows, and critics regard the claimed patterns as selection from chance. No astronomical alignment establishes a builder or a date; the physical dating evidence does, and it says 17th century.

## Why people believe it
- The tower genuinely is odd. It is roofless, floorless, and unlike the ordinary frame windmills of colonial New England, so the instinct that it demands a special explanation is understandable even though the special explanation does not survive the evidence.
- It arrived pre-wrapped in romance. Rafn's Norse thesis and Longfellow's poem gave Americans a stirring Viking origin story in the 1830s and 1840s, and a myth with that much emotional and literary momentum is hard to dislodge with a windmill.
- It flatters a hunger for deep American antiquity. A medieval European monument on New England soil promises a longer, grander past than a colonial grain mill, and diffusionist theories that put Old World visitors in America before Columbus have a persistent popular appeal.
- The Templar version borrows the glamour of a global mystery. Tying the tower to Henry Sinclair, secret voyages, and hidden Templar knowledge slots it into a familiar and marketable genre, one that cable specials and popular books have kept in front of large audiences.
- A handful of real loose ends give the claims something to hold. Genuine questions about the mortar dating's methodology and about the building's unusual proportions let believers argue that the case is still open, even though the weight of evidence is not.

## Open questions
- Mortar radiocarbon dating remains methodologically delicate, and at least one published critique has questioned how the Newport samples were interpreted; a fresh, multi-laboratory redating with modern protocols would put the remaining doubt to rest.
- The tower's exact dimensions and some construction details differ from the closest English mill parallels, and no colonial account describes the actual raising of the structure, leaving a small documentary gap that fringe readings exploit.
- The reported solstice light effect has not been rigorously tested against what random window placement would produce, so whether any alignment is intentional or coincidental is still, strictly speaking, unquantified.

## Sources
- Newport Tower (Rhode Island), Wikipedia (2026): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newport_Tower_(Rhode_Island)
- Dating Ancient Mortar, American Scientist (2003): https://www.americanscientist.org/article/dating-ancient-mortar
- On the Carbon-14 Analyses of Mortar from the Newport Tower: Theoretical Considerations, Newport History (Salve Regina University Digital Commons) (2000): https://digitalcommons.salve.edu/newporthistory/vol69/iss238/3/
- The Newport Tower: Not a 12th-Century Baptistery, Archaeology Review (Carl Feagans) (2025): https://ahotcupofjoe.net/2025/01/the-newport-tower-not-a-12th-century-baptistery/
- A Closer Look at the Mysterious Newport Tower, Rhode Island Monthly (2019): https://www.rimonthly.com/a-closer-look-at-the-mysterious-newport-tower/
- Newport Tower, Atlas Obscura (2020): https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/newport-tower
- The Newport Tower, New England (Yankee Magazine) (2016): https://newengland.com/travel/rhode-island/newport-tower/
- Mysterious Newport Tower shines bright on Winter Solstice, WPRI 12 News (2021): https://www.wpri.com/dont-miss/mysterious-newport-tower-shines-bright-on-winter-solstice/

Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. Full page: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/newport-tower