[1] Eben Horsford spent the fortune he had made by reformulating baking powder on attempting to prove that the Icelandic explorer Leif Erikson had settled somewhere along the Charles River.

Before he died in 1893, he asked his daughter to carry on his work, and she continued excavations he had begun in an area of Cambridge known as Gerry's Landing, where she turned up the remains of a large house that she believed had belonged to Erikson's successor Thorfinn Karlsefni.

[3] She also spent time editing and publishing her father's writings, especially the short manuscript Leif's House in Vinland, which was issued in book form paired with Horsford's own essay "Graves of the North Men".

Her publications on the subject of Norse explorers in North America ranged from two books to articles in nonspecialist magazines such as Popular Science Monthly and National Geographic.

[5] Due to a continuing lack of substantive artefacts, the theory that the Norse explorers had settled along the Charles River went from controversial to unsustainable in Horsford's own lifetime, and serious scholars interested in the subject looked elsewhere in North America for such traces.