The round stone Newport Tower standing on arched pillars in a green park in Newport, Rhode Island, with a church spire behind it

The Newport Tower: A Colonial Windmill, or a Relic from Before Columbus?

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A tower with no roof and no agreed builder

In the middle of Touro Park, on a hill above the waterfront at Newport, Rhode Island, stands a round tower of rough stone. It has no roof and no settled history. It is about 28 feet high and about 22 to 24 feet across, and it rests on eight stone columns joined by arches, so the ground floor is open to the air.

The tower is known as the Newport Tower, the Old Stone Mill, and the Touro Tower. To most historians, it is a windmill built in the mid-17th century, one of the oldest surviving buildings in the United States. To others, it is far older: a Viking baptistery, a Knights Templar church, a Portuguese watchtower, or a Chinese observatory, built centuries before Columbus. The argument has lasted nearly two hundred years.

What the tower looks like

The tower is not exactly circular. Its diameter is about 22 feet 2 inches (6.76 metres) from south-east to north-west, and about 23 feet 3 inches (7.09 metres) from east to west, probably because of the uneven rubble masonry. Its walls are about 3 feet thick, and the inner chamber is about 18 feet across.

The inside was once coated with white plaster, traces of which remain on several pillars. The main chamber has four windows, with three very small windows above, and a fireplace stands almost directly opposite the west window. Two of the eight arches are slightly broader than the other six.

Benedict Arnold and the will of 1677

The first firm evidence comes from the 17th century. Benedict Arnold — not the later traitor of the American Revolution, but his great-grandfather of the same name — was the first colonial governor of Rhode Island. He moved from Pawtuxet to Newport in 1651 and built a mansion on the hill where the tower stands; the house has long since been demolished.

In his will, dated 1677, Arnold refers to “my stone built Wind Mill” and describes his burial ground as lying between his dwelling house and the mill. The burial ground still exists today. The reference is generally accepted as referring to the Newport Tower, and it is the strongest evidence that the tower was once used as a windmill. Other documents agree: a deed dated 28 February 1677 calls it “ye Stone Mill”, and a plan of Newport published in 1776 marks it as “Stone Wind Mill”.

Later the tower served as a hay store in 1760 and as a powder store, and during the American Revolution the Americans used it as a lookout and the British used it to store munitions. William S. Godfrey, whose 1951 Harvard dissertation reported on the first excavation of the site, concluded that “at some period before 1677 Arnold built the Old Stone Mill”. That remains the mainstream view: the tower was built on Arnold’s land, in the early 1670s, as a corn mill.

A windmill like the one in Warwickshire

Historians find the windmill explanation convincing partly because the tower closely resembles a known English windmill: Chesterton Windmill, near Chesterton in Warwickshire, England. Chesterton is a stone tower mill raised on arches, of a similar size and shape, and research since the 1980s has confirmed that it was built as a windmill in 1632–33, after the original building accounts were traced. Arnold was born in England, and he may well have known of the Chesterton design.

There were objections. Godfrey himself at first doubted the tower had been built as a mill, partly because tower mills were not common in England until the early 18th century, and partly because the tower contains a ground-level fireplace. Both objections have weakened: tower mills are now known in England from the late 13th century, and fireplaces are found in other English windmills. Other 17th-century stone tower mills survive in North America, including the Moulin de Grondines in Quebec, dated 1674.

Digging for answers: 1848, 1948, and 1993

The documents leave room for doubt — Arnold’s will says the tower was his windmill, but not that he built it — so researchers have turned to the stones themselves. In 1848, the Reverend Dr. Jackson of Newport compared mortar from the tower with mortar from the town’s oldest buildings. The samples were of very similar composition: shell lime, sand, and gravel.

In 1948, the Society for American Archaeology investigated the site, directed by Hugh Henken of Harvard University, with field work headed by William S. Godfrey. A trench one metre wide was dug through the tower. The results, published in Godfrey’s 1951 dissertation, concluded that all the artefacts discovered were from the 17th century. No medieval objects were found.

The most decisive test came in 1993, when researchers from Denmark and Finland carried out radiocarbon dating of the tower’s mortar, drilling deep into the walls to get past later repairs. The mortar was made between 1635 and 1698, and a 2003 report put the date of the tower at about 1680. Later excavations in 2006–2008 produced no evidence of a pre-colonial building.

How the mystery began

If the evidence is so consistent, why has the tower been argued over for so long? The answer lies in the 19th century, when it first became famous as a mystery rather than as a mill. In 1837, the Danish archaeologist Carl Christian Rafn proposed a Viking origin in his book Antiquitates Americanæ, based partly on the inscriptions on Dighton Rock, a boulder near the mouth of the Taunton River in Massachusetts. He believed Scandinavians had built the tower in the early 12th century as a Christian baptistery.

Rafn’s theory arrived when America was eager for a romantic past, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used the Norse view in his 1840 poem “The Skeleton in Armor”. In 1942, the archaeologist Philip Ainsworth Means gathered the known evidence in his book Newport Tower, claiming the tower was a church built between the 11th and 14th centuries. Much of Means’s evidence has since been shown to be mistaken.

The Viking claim, and the others

The Norse theory remains the best known alternative. Its supporters argue that Norse voyagers reached North America around the year 1000, that the settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland proves a Norse presence, and that the southern extent of Norse exploration is uncertain. On that uncertainty they build a case: the tower’s round form resembles medieval round churches in northern Europe, such as the Orphir Round Church on Orkney, built around 1115.

The problems are considerable. No Norse building of this size or appearance is known. No Norse artefacts have been found at the site, despite excavation. The Dighton Rock inscriptions on which Rafn partly relied have never been accepted as Norse writing. And the radiocarbon dates fall in the 17th century, not the 12th. Mainstream scholars regard the Viking origin as unsupported.

Other theories have followed the same pattern. The British writer Andrew Sinclair has argued that the tower was built by medieval Scottish Templars led by Henry Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, on an alleged voyage to New England about a hundred years before Columbus — a voyage that has been vigorously disputed. A Portuguese theory links the tower to the Corte-Real brothers, who sailed to the New World around 1500–1502 and never returned. A Chinese theory was popularised by Gavin Menzies in 1421: The Year China Discovered America; his claims have been overwhelmingly rejected, and no Chinese material has been found at the site. None of these claims is supported by excavation, dating, or contemporary documents.

Why the windmill explanation prevails

The mainstream conclusion is not that the alternative theories are impossible in principle. It is that they are unsupported, while the windmill explanation is supported from several directions at once: the documents place a stone windmill on Arnold’s land in 1677; the mortar matches 17th-century mortar in Newport, and radiocarbon dating places it between 1635 and 1698; excavation has produced 17th-century artefacts and nothing earlier; and the design matches a known English windmill, Chesterton, built in 1632–33. Historians describe the question as settled in mainstream scholarship and open only in popular debate.

The tower today

In 1854, Judah Touro, a wealthy New Orleans businessman and philanthropist, gave the city of Newport $10,000 to buy the land on which the tower stood, so that it could be preserved as a public park. The tower and its surroundings became Touro Park, and the tower is now part of the Newport Historic District.

Visitors today find the tower fenced, but clearly visible from the paths of the park. Across Mill Street, the small Newport Tower Museum presents the competing theories about its origins. The real story is remarkable enough without Vikings or Templars: a colonial governor built a stone windmill on a hill above a young port town, ground corn there, and was buried beside it. Nearly three and a half centuries later, it still stands, open to the sky, and still argued over.

What is documented, and what is not

Documented facts: The Newport Tower is a round stone tower in Touro Park, Newport, Rhode Island, about 28 feet high and 22 to 24 feet across, supported by eight cylindrical columns forming stone arches. Benedict Arnold’s will of 1677 refers to “my stone built Wind Mill” on his Newport land, and documents from 1677, 1741, and 1776 describe it as a stone mill or windmill. It was later used as a hay store and a powder store, and during the American Revolution as a lookout and a munitions store. Mortar sampled in 1848 matched other 17th-century Newport buildings; excavation in 1948 found only 17th-century artefacts; and radiocarbon dating of the mortar in 1993 gave a range of 1635 to 1698. Judah Touro gave $10,000 in 1854 for the city to buy the land.

Unverified or disputed claims: The claims that the tower was built by Vikings in the 12th century, by the Knights Templar under Henry Sinclair in the 14th century, by Portuguese navigators such as the Corte-Real brothers, by Chinese sailors from Zheng He’s voyages, or by an English expedition as a fort in 1583 are not supported by excavation, dating, or contemporary documents, and mainstream scholars do not accept them. The claimed astronomical alignments of the tower’s windows have not been confirmed as deliberate design and may be accidental. No earlier builder or earlier date than Arnold has been established.

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