The Devil's Den in Hemlock Gorge

There are lots of places in New England named after the Devil. A few years ago, I published some lists on this blog. I'm not going to repost the full list today, but I have included a list of the Bay State's devilish places at the end of this post. 

I've been to several of these places, like the Devil's Footprint in Ipswich, the Devil's Den in Ashland, and another Devil's Den in Newbury. Amazingly, though, I've never been to the Devil's Den in Hemlock Gorge, which is in Needham right on the Newton border. I've lived in the Greater Boston area for more than 30 years, but somehow never visited the devilish place closest to me.

Last weekend we set out to rectify that. Hemlock Gorge is easily accessible by the MBTA Green Line, so Tony and I filled our water bottles, hopped on the T, and were soon at the Hemlock Gorge Reservation. I have to say that this park is worth visiting even if you aren't interested in vaguely Satanic caves. It's situated right on the Charles River and has some nice walking trails, but it also has the enormous Echo Bridge, which was built in 1877 to contain an aqueduct. The bridge is only open to pedestrians and has amazing views from its top. 

We entered the reservation from the northern side. The first thing we passed was this very dramatic spillway, where water from the Charles River flows under Route 9. I'm glad I'm not a fish or a small duck because I would definitely go over those falls to my doom.

Near the spillway was this old stone barn. Since I'm a horror-nerd, at first it reminded me of the Whateley house in H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror," whose windows and doors have been sealed up to contain an amorphous, ever-growing, ravenous monstrosity. A closer look revealed there was indeed an unsealed door and also some open windows, and a sign indicated that the building is used for some type of scientific purpose. 

Sadly, this probably means there isn't a monster inside. I guess that's good news for the neighbors, but the barn has always been a source speculation. For example, when the barn was built in 1839 some locals thought it was going to be used to raise silkworms. That never worked out, even though silkworms are preferable to monsters.

The Devil's Den was just a short walk from the barn. I knew it was a cave of some kind, but I had modest expectations because most caves in Massachusetts are pretty small. That was not the case! It's actually large enough to stand up in, and is located on a steep embankment overlooking a pond. There's also a small, little cave right next to it which is too small to hold a human.

A lot of Massachusetts caves are formed by boulders that were piled on top of each other by the glaciers. That type of cave is called a tallus cave, but the Devil's Den is quite different. It's carved out of solid puddingstone, not formed by assorted boulders. I don't know what geological forces did this, and I'm assuming it was a combination of water and wind. 

Like a lot of weird places we've visited, there was some graffiti in the Devil's Den. Although I'm not a fan of graffiti, I can understand why teenagers would want to leave their mark in someplace named after the Devil. Many of the places we visit are just slightly off the beaten path and are good locations for teens who want to hide their illicit behavior from their parents. At least there wasn't a lot of trash or broken glass in the cave, which was nice. 

This excellent page about Hemlock Gorge says that that local Native Americans may have used the cave to dry fish, but I couldn't find any information about why it's called the Devil's Den. King's Handbook of Newton (1879) only says the following: 

Just across, on the Needham Shore, is the old rocky grotto known as the Devil's Den. This is, of course, to be expected; for poor must be the New-England town that has not its bit of a cavern, consecrated to his Plutonian Majesty. 

As that quote sarcastically notes, you really can find caves or rock formations named after the Devil in many places. But why? I've seen a few theories trying to explain this. One claims that many of these places were associated with Native Americans, and that racist settlers gave them them devilish names because they thought the Native Americans were evil. That could explain the Devil's Den in Hemlock Gorge.

Sometimes there are also legends about particular devilish places that explain how they got their name. The legends might claim a particular cave earned its sinister name because it was used by smugglers or bandits, or that a particular rock formation was literally formed by the action of the Devil (like the Devil's footprints in Ipswich and Norton). Underlying all these legends and place names are old Puritan ideas about good and evil, where things outside the norm (like strange rock formations) were considered suspicious and assigned to the Devil. 

Interestingly, Needham has two Devil's Dens - the one we visited in Hemlock Gorge, and another one in the Town Forest. I think the one in Hemlock Gorge is larger and easier to access, but I'm jealous that Needham has two Devil's Dens. I can imagine it might cause confusion, though, if you're invited to the Devil's Den for nefarious deeds (or just a hike) but the location is not specified. 

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Places in Massachusetts named after the Devil

Devil's Back, Hull 

Devil's Basin, Newbury

Devil's Bridge, Gay Head 

Devil's Brook, Sharon

Devil's Brook, Stoughton 

Devils Cavern, Amherst (see also Devil's Garden)

Devil's Coffin, Sutton 

Devil's Corncrib, Sutton 

Devil's Den, Andover (now often called Den Rock)

Devil's Den, Aquinnah 

Devil's Den, Arlington (now Menotomy Rocks Park)

Devil's Den, Ashland

Devil's Den, Goshen 

Devil's Den, Hemlock Gorge, Needham and Newton

Devil's Den, Needham

Devil's Den, Newbury

Devil's Den, Oxford 

Devil's Den, Rockport

Devil's Den, Weston

Devil's Dishfull Pond, Peabody 

Devil's Foot Island, Woods Hole

Devil's Football, Hadley  

Devil's Footprint, Ipswich 

Devil's Footprint, Norton

Devil's Garden, Amherst (see also Devil's Cavern)

Devil's Garden, Lynnfield 

Devil's Hollow, Marshfield 

Devil's Hopyard, Shelburne Falls 

Devil's Kitchen, Lynnfield

Devil's Landslide, Wellesley

Devil's Lane, Warren 

Devil's Oven, Sherborn 

Devil's Oven, Westwood

Devil's Peak, Warren

Devil Pond, Westport (now called Devol Pond because it is more family friendly)

Devil's Pond, Rehoboth (sometimes called Sabin Pond)

Devil's Pool, Pelham 

Devil's Pulpit, Great Barrington

Devil's Pulpit, Housatonic 

Devil's Pulpit, Leominster 

Devil's Pulpit, Nahant

Devil's Pulpit, Newbury (historic, may no longer exist)

Devil's Rock, Rochester

Devil's Rock, Sharon

Devil's Rock, Swansea

Vikings in Boston? Norumbega Rises Again!

"I have to-day the honor of announcing to the discovery of Vinland, including the Landfall of Leif Erickson and the Site of his Houses. I have also to announce to you the discovery of the site of the Ancient City of Norumbega." (Eben Norton Horsford and Edward Henry Clement, The Discovery of the Ancient City of Norumbega, A Communication to the President and Council of the American Geographical Society their Special Session in Watertown, November 21, 1889)

"If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard.” (Dorothy Gale, The Wizard of Oz)

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If you've ever been to Kenmore Square in Boston you might have noticed a statue of famed Viking Leif Erikson in the middle of Commonwealth Avenue. I bet Leif wasn't as youthful and perky as this statue portrays him, but I'm willing to acknowledge artistic license. But more importantly: why is this statue here?

The author and Leif Erikson

Eben Norton Horsford helped put it there.

Near Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge stands a plaque that claims: "On this spot in the year 1000 Leif Erikson built his house in Vineland." What? Leif Erikson lived in Cambridge? That'sjust  not true. The plaque is also the work of Eben Norton Horsford.

Further down the Charles River, in Weston, stands an anomalous stone tower. A plaque at its base claims the tower marks the site of the ancient city of Norumbega, which was a Viking settlement. Eben Norton Horsford strikes again.

Eben Norton Horsford

Horsford was born in 1818 in upstate New York. He trained as a civil engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and had a successful career as an academic, eventually teaching at Harvard for 16 years. According to Wikipedia, he specialized in topics like "phosphates, condensed milk, fermentation, and emergency rations."

Horsford is most famous for his reformulation of baking powder. He replaced the traditional cream of tartar with calcium biphosphate, which made it more reliable and effective. With this new formula he founded the Rumford Chemical Works and became a very wealthy man. You can still buy Rumford Baking Powder even oday.

Horsford made his money in the physical sciences, but his real passion was not baking powder or fermentation. It was proving the Vikings visited America before Columbus did. Horsford was not alone in his passion. The theory that Norsemen had been the first Europeans in America had initially been popularized by a Danish scholar named Carl Christian Rafn in 1837, and it found a lot of support in late 19th century America. At that time many Catholics from Southern Europe were immigrating into the United States, and the more established Anglo-Saxon Protestants (like Horsford) didn't like it. They also didn't like the fact that Christopher Columbus was a Catholic from Southern Europe. It just felt unseemly somehow!

A youthful and fresh-faced Leif Erikson

We now know that Norse explorers did reach the America's first, thanks to the discovery in the 1960s of a Viking settlement in L'Anse au Meadows, Newfoundland. Archeologists say the settlement was established around 1,000 AD and probably supported a maximum of 130 people. They did not stay long or make a lasting impact. So no, Columbus was not the first European to reach North America, but he was the first to make any real impact.

Horsford had no archaeological training, but he did have a lot of money to promote his theory that Vikings had not only come to North America, but they had come to Massachusetts. Conveniently, he found proof right in his own backyard.

The amateur archeologist claimed to have unearthed that proof — rocks that he said were the foundation stones of Erikson’s house — around the corner from his Cambridge home along the banks of the Charles River. “Horsford basically walked from his house, went to the riverbank, found rocks, and said, ‘Aha! This is a house,’ ” says William R. Short, an author and independent scholar specializing in Viking-age topics. “But they don’t look like the foundation stones of typical Viking-age houses. They look like the rocks of Cambridge.” ("Uncovering New England's Viking Connections," The Boston Globe, November 23, 2013.)

Horsford theorized, in his 1890 book The Discovery of the Ancient City of Norumbega, that the Norsemen had come to the Charles River basin in search of oak burrs (those large lumps that grow on the side of oak trees) which they used to make drinking cups and other items. They were so valuable that the Norse created a vast series of dams and canals across Massachusetts to transport them to the ocean:

At first the maser wood (oak burrs) would be gathered near the settlement, as we have seen; but the supply would soon be exhausted. The choppers must go farther. There were no horses, no roads. The obvious method of transportation was by water, - at first from the immediate wooded shores of the Charles, then from the shores of its tributaries, and the along artificial canals, conducting to these tributaries and the river. (The Discovery of the Ancient City of Norumbega, 1890, p. 29)

Horsford claimed to have found Viking-built canals in Newton, Weston, Cambridge, Woburn, Dedham, Brighton, and many other towns in Massachusetts. Skeptics argued that these canals and other stone structures had obviously been built by English colonial settlers, but Horsford said they had simply repaired pre-existing Viking canals. Again, he had no evidence to support his theory.

Oak burr!

How many Norsemen would it take to build all this? Horsford estimated about 10,000 of them lived in Massachusetts.


As I wrote two weeks ago, the name Norumbega probably comes from a mistranslation of the Italian phrase "non oro bega," meaning "no gold to quarrel about." Italian cartographers had put it on maps of New England to indicate there was no gold here. Horsford claimed the word Norumbega was an Algonquin interpretation of the word Norvege, meaning "Norway," and was the name of the Viking settlement. Needless to say, the local Indians have no memory or records of Vikings settling the Charles River.

Even during his lifetime Horsford's theories faced opposition from historians. For example, the Massachusetts Historcial Society opposed the effort to erect the statue of Leif Erikson, and one National Geographic Society publication even stated the following:

"The most incautious linguistic inferences, and the most uncritical, cartographical perversions, are presented in Eben Norton Horsford's 'Discovery of America by Northmen." (quoted in Horsford's The Problem of the Northmen,1889)

"Cartographical perversions" is a pretty strong condemnation. After his death Horsford's works fell into relative obscurity. I'm sure the changing demographics of Massachusetts's population probably had a role to play, as the state became increasingly Catholic. The particular anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant sentiments that helped fuel his efforts died out.

 

Horsford's thriving Viking city may have been a delusion, but the monuments he erected remain to remind us of the mythical Norumbega and the real-life dreamers and eccentrics who make our region's history so rich. Even though Leif Erikson never sailed up the Charles River New England is still a strange and wonderful place.