CHAPTER 3
THE HAMMONASSET LINE
A Solstice Line across the Land
Have you ever heard of the Hammonasset Line? Probably not, I hadn’t either.
The Hammonasset Line, which starts at Montauk on Long Island, goes through Connecticut and crosses over into New York State, is composed of precolonial stone structures that are theorized to be many thousands of years old. Cairns, unusual walls, marking boulders, and travel ways are all found along the line through many townships. The line marks both the winter solstice sunrise and summer solstice sunset. In Connecticut, the line has been useful for predicting and locating sites where many ancient stone cairns and structures have been found.
After rediscovering the alignments of these ancient structures, traced from the site located on and near his property in Hammonasset, Connecticut, researcher Charles Thomas Paul extended the Hammonasset Line and discovered it aligns with the Devil’s Tombstone in Stony Clove, New York, between Phoenicia and Hunter, which, too, apparently orients toward the summer and winter solstices.
After crossing the Hudson River and passing through the town of Saugerties, the Hammonasset Line runs across the easternmost part of Woodstock before ascending the eastern slope of Overlook Mountain, crossing into Greene County, and heading into the Catskill Mountains toward Devil’s Tombstone. The line crosses into the Catskills at a point near the southern terminus of what was said to have been referred to by local Natives as “the Wall of the Manitou,” an imposing buttress of sheer mountain walls running north and south between Woodstock and Catskill and directly facing the Hudson River valley to the east.
According to Evan Pritchard, author of Native New Yorkers, Manitou, and its variants, simply means “spirit” in Algonquian tongues, and, joined to other words, relates to all aspects of Algonquin spirituality, including vision quests and shamanic journeys. The farther up you journeyed into the mountains, a higher level of heaven was attained. The twelfth Manitou or residing spirit was on the highest level. This cultural belief of multiple levels of heaven has correlations with those of peoples from other ancient cultures, from Indian rishis to Egyptian priests and even in Christian scripture. There’s a good reason that Tibetan Buddhists chose a spot near the top of Overlook Mountain in Woodstock for their monastery.
Interestingly, Pritchard has identified a standing stone just north of Route 212, between Woodstock and Saugerties and across from a pond, that he believes sits on the Hammonasset Line*1 (Pritchard 2007).
Having the Hammonasset Line pass through Woodstock and Saugerties seems to put our geographic area in good company with many other sacred sites that have markers aligned with the yearly solstices, including Newgrange in Ireland, Uaxactun in Guatemala, Palenque in Mexico, and the Temple at Karnak in Egypt.†2
The New England Antiquities Research Association (NEARA) is an organization I’ve belonged to for ten years now, and I’m becoming more actively involved in their research.‡3 The Hammonasset Line is of particular interest to me because it actually crosses through the area close to my home and seems to come very near cairns identified on Overlook Mountain, as well as other stone markers in the valley below.
The stoneworks along the Hammonasset Line are considered to be memorials or burial markers aligned with the position of the solstice sun and may suggest some sort of widespread burial cult or ritual in practice during the Woodland and perhaps the Late Archaic period. Since the line is dated to around five thousand years ago, a time when sun worship was at its height in places like Egypt and the British Isles, I thought this an interesting coincidence, given that some believe the Egyptian cultural influence may have spread worldwide during that civilization’s high point around 2500 BCE.
Fig. 3.1. The Hammonasset Line plotted from Montauk, Long Island, to Stony Clove, New York, at 318.5° northwest
Fig. 3.2. The Hammonasset Line passes through Saugerties and Woodstock, New York
So the details of the theory make the claim that the Hammonasset Line, which begins at a burial complex near the tip of Long Island, runs to Devil’s Tombstone in Greene County, New York, and I have confirmed this. I have plotted the line using computer mapping software. From its starting point on Long Island (Fort Pond Hill in Montauk) to Devil’s Tombstone, the line follows 318.5° northwest (magnetic north) or 304.25° northwest (true north) from Montauk when accounting for the 14.25° declination (the calculated difference between true and magnetic north at Montauk currently, when true north = magnetic north − declination). Remember, since the Earth’s magnetic field drifts over time, magnetic north would have been slightly different hundreds or thousands of years ago by up to 0.75°.
On my maps, it looks like the line crosses the easternmost corner of Woodstock Township, then heads over the slopes above West Saugerties Road, where I believe other cairns have already been discovered. Following the line along the 318.5° northwest (magnetic north) bearing from Montauk, it intersects Woodstock and enters the mountains, then parallels Devil’s Kitchen (Platte Clove) along the summits just to the west before nearly bisecting Stony Clove at Devil’s Tombstone. This is the path and point where the summer solstice sun sets from Montauk, and that has not changed. Plotting the alignments on the Earth’s surface would show a slight change, but in the woods and fields and on the ridgelines, alignments would still hold true today as always.
Now, just for the fun of it and still using computer mapping software, I continued extending the Hammonasset Line, following the 318.5° (magnetic north) bearing from Montauk on Long Island, which, again, points to the site where the summer sun sets on the longest day of the year and where the winter sun rises on the shortest day. It is surprising and curious that the line leads to an area in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula known for ancient copper mines believed to have been exploited by foreign visitors to North American shores thousands of years ago. Another coincidence? (Fell 1989).
Even more curiously, the line crosses a small, mile-wide island on the far eastern tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan called Manitou Island and then goes on through Isle Royale at the U.S.-Canadian border. Both these islands and the Keweenaw Peninsula are places known for Native American cultural activity dating back thousands of years. And as is known, the word Manitou relates to the Native American spirit and is usually associated with a spiritual quality, quest, or journey.
Fig. 3.3. The Hammonasset Line extended to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula
Fig. 3.4. Manitou Island, off the Keweenaw Peninsula
This may all be just coincidence, but there could be something more to it, and it has piqued NEARA’s interest.
In the spring of 2007, a group of researchers, including NEARA New York State coordinator Polly Midgley and Princeton University Art Museum conservator Norman E. Muller, planned to examine the stone cairns on Overlook Mountain. The group hoped to survey, measure, and photograph the several dozen mounds that have been identified, search for clues to their age and origin, and determine how close to the Hammonasset Line they actually lie. And NEARA members and researchers with friends and colleagues in Michigan are pressing their contacts there for information and reports from that area. Since that time additional research and surveys have occurred, and data gathered from different geographic areas confirms what was documented at the site at that time. This significant site sits very near the Hammonasset Line and contains elements found universally at sacred sites.
One very significant point is that this line, the Hammonasset Line, if plotted properly, points directly to the Catskills and specifically to Overlook Mountain all the way from eastern Long Island. This fact should help confirm the spiritual importance and high reverence the Natives and others must have held for the mountains and their lofty summits. I believe this is important and should be remembered, researched, and documented with an attitude that honors the precolonial stonework found along the entire length of the Hammonasset Line and elsewhere.
I think this all plays well into the theory of my friend, NEARA member Dave Holden, that the Woodstock valley was once used as a funeral zone by the Native tribes whose territorial borders shared our region and who created burial memorials placed in a systematic way along alignments. And it might be suggested further, and the Hammonasset Line seems to support it, that the ritual of burials along a line or grid of lines associated with the winter solstice sunrise and summer solstice sunset may have been widespread and suggestive of a type of burial cult in the northeastern United States (and perhaps farther inland) that carried out such practices for thousands of years.