Yarmouth Stone

[1] The stone appears to have an inscription carved into it which investigators have interpreted as Norse runes, Japanese, Basque, or early Greek.

[2] It has a purported runic inscription carved near the top of one naturally smooth face; the stone does not appear to have been dressed in any way.

Richard Fletcher, a retired surgeon of the British Army, settled in Yarmouth in 1809, on a lot of land at the northwest tip of the harbour.

It became much more widely known in 1884, when Henry Phillips, corresponding secretary of the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia, published a paper claiming that the inscription is runic, and went so far as to translate it as "Hako's son addressed the men."

These interpretations took root in Yarmouth and in much of North America, long before it was proven that the Norse had actually reached the continent, with the discovery of the settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in 1960.

In his 1890 monograph "The Vinland of the Northmen", published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, he deals with the stone at considerable length, and states that the supposed inscription does not agree with runic ones.

[8]Interest in and belief in the authenticity of the stone grew however to the point where in the late 1930s plans for a national park were being considered.

The recalcitrant markings were allegedly “clarified” under his ministrations with hammer and chisel, transforming the faint tracings described in the nineteenth century into the much more emphatic text of the twentieth.

But then a Nova Scotia born professor of archaeology, A. D. Fraser, wrote that it showed saw marks and that "There is a strong probability, I think, that the thing is the work of an Indian of perhaps a century back who found a discarded ballast block and utilized it for his own purposes."

[9] Despite all this in 1947 the local museum ordered more copies of Standwold's pamphlet on the stone, and others claiming expertise continued to pronounce it genuine.

New interpretations were brought forward - Hungarian, Welsh, Mayan, and in 1993 the local paper ran an editorial titled "The 'runic stone' - why don't we just say it was left by aliens?

The stone and the presumed connection it made between Yarmouth and the medieval Norse, influenced popular culture in the community from the late 19th century until the present day.