A view of an Amazon tributary in Peru. (Photo: Paul Alexander/flickr)

Steven King had to learn the hard way that wearing G.I.-style boots in the Amazon jungle was not a good idea.

It was the late 1970s, and King, a young ethnobotanist, was studying diet and medicinal plants through the Amazonian Anthropology and its Practical Application Center, in Peru, while working for a tribe of Secoya people who lived in the forest. During his nine month stay, King learned to hunt and helped the tribe clear small sections of the forest so they could plant gardens. King also spent an inordinate amount of time tending to his footwear, and to his feet, which, in the dampness of the Peruvian Amazon, had succumbed to fungal infections and blisters.

“I learned that the smart thing to wear are sandals, or no shoes at all,” King recalls. He also learned to treat his wounds using sap from a local tree called Sangre de Drago. Meaning Dragon’s Blood in English, the name is both poetic and precise, since the sap of the tree is bright red, and stands out vividly against the reptilian-looking bark, which is stubbly, grey and usually covered in moss. Valued for its medicinal properties, the sap has been used widely across South America to treat everything from upset stomachs to colds, and because it contains latex, it’s also a liquid bandage, forming a second skin over open wounds. It was the only thing that relieved King’s burning feet.

Sangre de Grado, or Dragon's Blood. (Photo: por natikka/WikiCommons CC BY 2.5)

Eventually, King’s personal discovery would also help launch a near-epic journey to bring that blood-red sap to the U.S. pharmaceutical market. It was a process that lasted decades and weathered the boom and bust of the dot com era, the crisis of the AIDS epidemic, a backlash against bio-prospecting, and trends around eco-activism, as it wended its way towards FDA approval. Twenty five years later, the tale of the blood red sap is both hopeful and cautionary, a window onto the history of finding cures in the rainforest, as well as the pitfalls and complications of bringing those cures to market.

Coming up as a young ethnobotanist, King, who is now Senior Vice President at Napo Pharmaceuticals, where he oversees sustainable supply, ethnobotanical research and intellectual property, was mentored by Dr. Richard Schultes, who is often described as “the father of ethnobotany”, “a swashbuckling plant hunter,” and “the last great explorer of the Victorian tradition,” in his 2001 New York Times obituary.

Those monikers bear the patina of romance, as well as the stain of white privilege. And yet Schultes’ field work is still widely revered. His books on hallucinogenic plants like peyote and ayahuasca were cultural touchstones for William Burroughs, Aldous Huxley, and other psychedelic explorers (most of whom Schultes roundly denounced). And his research into plants that produced curare–a poison applied to arrows, mostly for hunting monkeys and other prey–in the 1940s and 50s became foundational. Today, a diluted form of the poison curare is used as a muscle relaxer in surgery, and many plants that he collected still bear his name, including the orchid Pachyphyllum schultesi.

Dr. Richard Evan Schultes in the Amazon. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

In the decades that followed, a new generation of ethnobotanists set out to find cures in the Amazon with Schultes’ name on their lips. There was Tim Ploughman, who collected more than 700 specimens of coca plant, making him a foremost authority on the plant from which cocaine derives. (The nightshade species Brunfelsia plowmaniana was named for him.) And there was Wade Davis, who, after collecting some 6,000 botanical specimens, is now an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society.

There were also important breakthroughs, such as the discovery of Madagascar Periwinkle, an ancient folk remedy for diabetes that was marketed by Eli Lilly as a powerful anti-cancer drug.

But the ethics around such breakthroughs have long been cloudy at best, if not outright exploitative. For instance, as a consequence of the commercialization of Madagascar Periwinkle, “Eli Lilly now realizes $100 million annually from sales of these drugs, sold under the trade names Velbun and Oncovin,” writes Michael Hassemer, in a collection of legal essays titled, Indigenous Heritage and Intellectual Property.“In contrast, local populations do not share in the benefits that arise from the rosy periwinkle, which holds particularly true of the people of Madagascar, the original home of this plant.”

This unfair dynamic, now known as biopiracy, is also a long held tradition, and has been in play ever since the Portuguese first set foot on the shores of Brazil.

Madagascar periwinkle, or catharanthus roseus. (Photo: Joydeep/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

By 1980s, the hunt for plants had grown increasingly commercialized, with many scientists and pharmaceutical companies doing research into plants for medicine and agricultural products. The National Cancer Institute invested heavily in the search for tropical plants with tumor-fighting activity, and there were reports of researchers going from village to village in Africa, South America and Asia asking the people and their medicine men how they treat various maladies. 

At the time, King was completing a PhD on Andean tubers at the New York Botanical Garden, and spent his graduate fellowship working with a collection of medicinal plants, in a joint collaboration between the Botanical Gardens and Merck & Co. With a foot in both worlds, King remembers this as an era when big pharmaceutical companies, under increasing pressure to innovate, had turned plant hunting into big business.

Yet, King says, it was also the start of a downturn. Despite its investments in new plant research, The National Cancer Institute, which had screened some 35,000 plants and animals since 1956 in its quest to find anti-cancer compounds, abandoned the program in 1981 after largely failing to identify new treatments. And with new advances in chemistry and synthetic drugs, some companies were beginning to question the value of natural remedies.

“It was like, ‘why go to the rainforest when we can make this stuff in our labs?'” King says of the sentiment at the time.

Shaman Pharmaceuticals collected plants from regions such as Madagascar, above. (Photo: Rod Waddington/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)

However, as King would soon learn, his line of work could live and die by shifting social movements. In the 1990s, when saving the rainforest became the cause célèbre of the decade, there was a spike of enthusiasm for finding and protecting the natural cures of the Amazon. After a stint as Chief Botanist for Latin America for the Nature Conservancy, in Washington D.C., King was recruited by Shaman Pharmaceuticals, a biotech startup in San Francisco. There, he served as their scientific advisor, along with other Schultes protegees, including Mark Plotkin, who, at the time, was scouring the jungle for a cure for diabetes.

'We all had a mantra that we had to save the rainforest because it was a repository of natural drugs,'' Dr. Wade Davis, who studied ethnobotany at Harvard, told the New York Times in 1999.

This was a period of great promise for the sap of the Sangre de Drago, also known as Croton lechleri. Riding the fumes of the dot com bubble, Shaman Pharmaceuticals explored and invested in communities as far-flung as Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, Nigeria, and Peru, while implementing an approach that was more progressive than any previous era. Armed with teams of ethnobotanists, medical physicians, and local scientists, they reinvested 15 to 20 percent of their profits back into the local communities they met with, regardless of whether or not they ended up researching their local cures. The end results–mosquito nets for maternity wards in Tanzania; water pipes for thirsty villages in Borneo–were a calculated benefit in a time when countries were increasingly wary of bioprospecting.

“The odds of finding a drug you can take to market are really, really low because of the likelihood of any one thing being successful,” King says. “Putting into place an immediate sense of reciprocity had immediate and long term benefits. We wanted to build a global network of good will, so you didn't just have us gringos come and go.”

The flowers and stem from the Dragon's Blood tree. (Photo: Dick Culbert/flickr)

The company eventually collected some 2,300 plants, and it wasn’t long before they were homing in on the blood-red goo that King had first encountered in the ‘70s. Used widely to treat everything from machete cuts and sore gums to postpartum hemorrhaging, the company started isolating and extracting its various compounds, testing its antiviral activities, with an eye towards treating respiratory infections. They also began to cultivate Sangre de Drago on the ground by employing local, small-scale farmers to plant it amongst their other crops.

Supply, King found, would not be a problem. “I wouldn’t call it a weed, because that’s too pejorative,” King says of Sangre de Drago. “But it’s a super-abundant pioneer species.”

Back in the lab, they had given up on the respiratory angle, and found success by isolating another compound that held potential for treating diarrhea by stemming the loss of fluids. The compound, which came to be known as Crofelemer, had legs. It passed initial clinical trials, and with AIDS activists and patients crying out furiously for better treatments–diarrhea was just one of the many potentially dangerous side effects of antiretroviral drugs–the FDA was soon interested. King was optimistic that the drug might one day be used to fight cholera and treat refugees and vulnerable children–anyone at risk of dying from diarrhea-related diseases.

Yet bringing a drug to market can take more time than investors are willing to spare. When the FDA sent the drug back for more trials, Shaman Pharmaceuticals’ stock slid until it was virtually worthless. The company abandoned their mission, and after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, changed their name to Shaman Botanicals and moved into dietary supplements, becoming part of a growing trend of beauty brands that partnered with local cultures. Meanwhile, Lisa Conte, Shaman’s original founder, continued on her course. After purchasing its technology and botanical collections, she founded a new biotech firm called Napo Pharmaceuticals, and brought King into the fold once more.

Thus began a decade-long low point of complicated partnerships and infomercials–a period that King looks back on as “pretty hysterical.”

A specimen of Brunfelsia plowmaniana, named after Tim Ploughman. (Photo: Daniel Mietchen/WikiCommons CC BY 3.0)

The tides changed again in 2012, when Crofelemer finally broke through. After years of being sold by way of 1-800 numbers, the drug was approved by the FDA, becoming the first anti-diarrheal drug for HIV/AIDS patients, and only the second botanical prescription ever approved by the FDA. Conte’s firm licensed the product to Salix while retaining the intellectual property rights. “It makes it all worthwhile,” Conte once said of the approval. 

Today, after a grinding but ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit with Salix, which the company sued for “deliberately blocking, or unreasonably impeding” Crofelemer’s sales (the drug was notably slow to reach the people who needed it), Crofelemer is available by prescription, and King has branched into the veterinary and agricultural market. Most recently, there have been hopeful signs that Sangre de Drago-based drugs may help treat diarrhea in calves and other farm animals (the product would not stop an infection, but it might help control the loss of fluids).

“This 25 year story is just insane,” King says, reflecting back on the journey of Sangre de Drago, and to that time in Peru, when he used its sap to treat the blisters on his feet. As for the future, King hasn’t given up on the hope that one day Crofelemer might be able to help the world’s most vulnerable populations–children, refugees, and of course, the communities that initially pointed them to it.

Update, 11/10. Shaman Pharmaceuticals did not partner with the traveling river salesman known as regatones to cultivate Sangre de Drago. The two parties were cultivating it at the same time. We regret the error. 

Imagine a rat about 10 times larger than this little guy. Much less cute. (Image: Jean-Jacques Boujot/Flickr)

Archaeology can yield a lot of surprises, as researchers from the Australian National University found out recently when they went searching for early signs of human life and ended up discovering the remains of what may have been the biggest rat to ever live.

ANU researcher Julien Louys and his team were in East Timor studying the movement habits of ancient humans when they found the rat fossils. The remains proved that rats about the size of a small dogs—and 10 times heavier than today's average rat—once skittered around the area.

Having only died out around a thousand years ago, the rats would have existed right alongside people. In fact, thanks to marks and scorches on the discovered bones, it appears that the humans of the day would have fed on these giant rodents.

While the researchers didn't expect to find their massive new rat, they are now looking into its past to find out why the species died out. It is thought that the rat population began to plummet as metal tools were introduced to the local culture, which not only would have made humans more effective hunters, but led to an increase in local deforestation. With nowhere to call home, the rats would have slowly died off, leaving humanity with mere rat-sized rats rather than dog-sized ones.

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

The locals of St. James Parish, Louisiana have their own unique, long-standing tradition of lighting teepee style pyres on fire for Christmas Eve, some of which are packed with fireworks as kindling.

Throughout the entire month of December, local families work together to build the pyres. The pyres themselves traditionally take pyramid or teepee shapes, but over the course of the years have varied to reflect popular cultural or political themes of significance for that year. Recent examples include gigantic log replicas of New Orleans Saints helmets, Budweiser bottles, trains, and a particularly poignant "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" figure in 2014 to commemorate Michael Brown and the tragedy in Ferguson.

The Festival of the Bonfires lasts through the entire month of the December, during which time one pyre is lit nightly, culminating in the final, simultaneous combustion of all remaining towers on Christmas Eve. Along the miles of levee, the pyres burn with intensity and explode into brilliant colors. By the river, even more fireworks are lit, creating a backdrop that paints the sky in bright, sparkling colors as the families lining both banks walk past the blazes in celebration of Christmas' impending arrival. 

The history of these fires is unclear, and attempts to trace its roots resemble history writing itself in reverse. Take, for example, today's most popular explanation involving fires lighting the way for Papa Noel (Cajun Santa Claus) on his alligator-drawn pirogue. The area is populated by those of German and French descent and it is believed the fiery tradition traveled with the settlers, whose pre-Christian holiday traditions include setting bonfires and detonating fireworks to either guide or ward-off pagan spirits. The earliest documents show these pyres in a neighboring parish along the batture, however, taking place during the summer Feast of St. John the Baptist at 1865, nearly a century after the Cajun settlers claimed the land (which is not to say they didn't take place earlier, undocumented).

It's historians' best guess that over time, the Festival of the Bonfires migrated to the Christmas holiday at a time, or were reintroduced to the area at the turn of the 20th century. The insertion of their purpose to "light the way for Papa Noel" and his alligator sleigh simply made for a fantastic story. And, Lord knows, if there's any time to celebrate an enchanting, debatably true origin story, it's Christmastime.

The Frisbie Pie Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut was started in 1871 by a Civil War veteran, and by the 1950s they were selling around 80,000 pies a day.

William Russell Frisbie returned to his home state of Connecticut after the Civil War and eventually settled into business, turning a division of the Olds Baking Company into a thriving eponymous pie empire. But as popular as the Frisbie pies became, the containers they came in – stamped Frisbie’s Pies in bold type on the bottom – would prove infinitely more so. A circular, flat metal pan, Frisbie’s tins had the requisite raised rim to not only hold in the pie, but they proved to be aerodynamic as well. Soon workers at the bakery on Kossuth Street, maybe inspired by local kids, noticed their aerodynamic quality, and during lunch breaks they took to throwing them around.

Frisbie supplied his pies to restaurants and grocery stores throughout the Northeast, and also to nearby Yale University. There the metal pies pans were liberated from the cafeteria and thrown all over campus, where Frisbie-ing became a popular study diversion. (There is a competing theory about the Frisbie name that’s been “tossed around.” Some say it wasn’t the pie tins, but instead the lids of the Frisbie sugar cookie containers that really flew – but either way Mr. Frisbie’s bakery still gets the credit.)

It would take the efforts of another man to help turn the popular campus pastime into an international craze and toy juggernaut. Across the country, in California, World War II fighter pilot Walter Morrison was no stranger to the subtleties of aerodynamics. He created a flying toy, similar in looks to the Frisbie pan, called the Whirlo-Way, which he changed to the Flying Saucer, and eventually to the Pluto Platter, in keeping with the popularity of science fiction in post-war America.

But sales of Morrison’s flying saucer toys were relatively modest until he was approached by the Wham-O Company in California, proud creators of the Hula Hoop. Acquiring the rights from Morrison, Wham-O’s founders Richard Knerr and Arthur "Spud" Melin recalled a recent trip to Connecticut where they had seen students on Yale’s illustrious campus tossing Frisbie pie pans to each other, yelling “Fris-bie!!” when there was an incoming tin. Knerr and Melin were struck by the name, altering the spelling slightly to Frisbee in 1957 (so as to avoid any pesky trademark problems). Wham-O would go on to eventually sell nearly 300 million Frisbees, and counting.

The very next year, in 1958, the bakery that lent its name to the Frisbee (whether they knew it or not) closed its doors and was sold to Table Talk Pies of Worcester, Massachusetts. Today the old location of the Frisbie Pie Company is a parking lot, right next door to an old elementary school. (Maybe it was those kids who first inspired the tossing of the pie tins…)

Blurring its way to a world title. (Photo: Norwegian Speed Factory/Facebook)

On Friday November 6, an unusual vehicle sped down the rain-slicked runway of Norway's Torp Sandefjord Airport. It wasn't a plane, a helicopter, or even one of those inscrutable little airport conveyances. It was a souped-up Viking T6 lawnmower, eschewing grass for pavement in search of a world speed title.

The Norwegians behind the green machine have been working on it for several months, in collaboration with VIKING gardening company. Led by driver Pekka Lundefaret, the team shredded their goal, bringing the mower up to 133.5 miles per hour and slicing up last year's record of 117 miles per hour.

"This is so great," Lundefaret told his hometown news outlet, Conpot. "I had never imagined that we might make a new world record today under these conditions." 

The mower has traded in much of its traditional hardware for speedier gear, and boasts a 408-horsepower V8 engine and Formula 3 wheels. Some fear that in its quest for greatness, the machine has traded its soul–its grass clipping collector, for example, has been converted into a fuel tank. As one YouTube commenter put it, "What about that thing is a lawnmower?" At press time, the World's Fastest Lawnmower was presumably zooming too quickly to respond.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

Joseph Noel Paton's 1849 painting of Oberon and Titania, fairies from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Fairies are renowned for causing mischief, so it is little surprise to discover that the fairytale capital of the world is in dispute. In one corner stands the city of Odense in Denmark (pop. 173,814), the birthplace of fabulous fabulist, Hans Christian Andersen. In the other corner looms the city of Kassel in Germany (pop. 194,087), hometown of the magicians of make-believe, the Grimm Brothers. Who is the rightful fairytale capital of the world? 

Andersen’s links to Odense are intense. The writer of countless classic fairytales, including  “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, “The Little Mermaid” and “The Ugly Duckling”, was born in a slum in the city, the son of an impoverished shoemaker. He was sent to a school for the poor that he hated and where he was roundly abused by both fellow pupils and teachers alike. The themes of being an outsider and an outcast, themes that suffuse Andersen’s sadder tales, can be traced back to his experiences in Odense. As such the city was instrumental in the creation of his fairytales. Today it is filled with statues of Andersen and his creations.

Hans Christian Andersen's childhood home in Odense. (Photo: Kåre Thor Olsen/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Grimms’ relationship to Kassel was quite the opposite. They grew up in a wealthy family and spent their formative years working as linguists in the pay of the King of Westphalia. They began collecting folk tales that they found in the royal library, or which they heard being told amongst their sister’s friends, or Kassel acquaintances such as Dorothea Viehmann, a tavern-owner’s daughter. The brothers compiled and published their first fairytale collection in 1812, unleashing on the world the stories of “Cinderella”, “Rapunzel” and the” Frog Princess”, although these stories have been greatly sanitized by translators and the Grimms themselves. (To give you an idea of the differences, in the original stories Cinderella’s sisters have their eyes pecked out by pigeons, Sleeping Beauty does not have an evil stepmother, and Rapunzel is pregnant). Kassel today lies at the heart of the German Fairy Tale Route, a 370-mile-long tour dedicated to the life and works of the Brothers Grimm.

 Interestingly Andersen actually met the Grimms in 1844, although not in Odense or Kassel but in Berlin. It was not a success. As Andersen described it in his autobiography:

“I entered the room, and Jacob Grimm, with his knowing and strongly marked countenance, stood before me.

“I come to you,” said I, “without letters of introduction because I hope that my name is not wholly unknown to you.”

“Who are you?” asked he.

I told him; and Jacob Grimm said, in a half-embarrassed voice, “I do not remember to have heard this name: what have you written?”

It was now my turn to be embarrassed in a high degree; but I now mentioned my little stories.

“I do not know them,” said he; “but mention to me some other of your writings, because I certainly must have heard them spoken of.”

I named the titles of several; but he shook his head. I felt myself quite unlucky."

Awkward introductions aside, Andersen and the brothers were eventually reconciled and became great friends. Alas the same cannot occur between Odense and Kassel. While there can be many great fairytale writers, there cannot be two fairytale capitals of the world.

An illustration from Fairy tales from Hans Christian Andersen, 1914. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

In order to discover the true fairytale capital of the world, it seems only sensible to try and discover where fairies themselves come from, and follow the pixie dust to what they call home. Fortunately while descriptions of nymphs, jinni and angels stretch back millennia, the term “fairy” dates only as far back as the Middle Ages. It is first mentioned in the Old French epic poems known as the chanson de geste (“song of deeds”). In the epic known as Huon of Bordeaux, a 13^th Century knightly romp, Huon is set a series of seemingly impossible tasks which he achieves with the assistance of the fairy king, Oberon. In this poem fairyland is described as existing just beyond Palestine. Other chansons suggest it is more in the vicinity of Persia.

Kassel, Germany, home of the Brothers Grimm. (Photo: Nikanos/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.5)

In A.C. Hamilton’s monumental encyclopedia on the granddaddy of fairy writing, Edmund Spenser, Hamilton explains that fairyland is constantly changing position because “Fairyland exists just beyond the boundaries of the known.” As knowledge of the world was constantly changing in the Middle Ages, fairyland itself kept moving. One moment it was near the Caspian Sea, the next by the Pacific. In fact fairyland tended to be located near whatever new land had recently been discovered. As Columbus discovered America and Magellan circumnavigated the globe, fairyland receded farther and farther away. Up to a certain point it had been possible to ride or sail to fairyland, but soon fairyland drifted out of reach, towards the stars, or as the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, to some place deep within: “Faery is a place of the mind, a place of knowledge and perception, a place where spirit and love are known and experienced.”

In other words, fairyland was nowhere at all.

The Brothers Grimm and historic buildings of Kassel on the last 1000 DM banknote. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

As such neither Odense nor Kassel, both of which are definitely somewhere, seem entirely suitable to be titled the Fairytale Capital of the World. Fortunately one other place is. Or rather, it isn’t.

Buxtehude in northern Germany (pop. 39,777) labels itself the Fairytale Capital of the World, but is rather overshadowed by Kassel and Odense. Its claim to the title rests largely on the fact that it is mentioned by name in a number of German fairytales, like in the Brothers Grimm’s “The Hare and the Hedgehog”.

Buxtehude, Germany, a claimant for 'Fairy Tale Capital of the World'. (Photo: Arne Hückelheim/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

In itself, this would offer little weight to its claim. However because of Buxtehude’s use as a backdrop for the fantastical, the town’s name has itself come to mean a faraway, imagined place. A German saying—“nach Buxtehude jagen”, “hunting for Buxtehude“— means something like “going on a wild goose chase.” “Buxtehude” has come to mean a place that you can’t find, a place that doesn’t exist, a place that is nowhere at all. Which, happily enough, is exactly where you can find fairyland.

Hidden in the cliff face of an escarpment in Ontario's Bruce Peninsula, the lovely seas cave known simply as "The Grotto," has long attracted visitors with its startlingly blue waters and secluded beauty.

Carved from the natural stone over thousands of years of erosion, the Grotto has become one of the most popular destinations in Bruce Peninsula National Park. It accessible both from the cave mouth at sea level and via a rocky chimney which can be found just off the main trail. The interior of the grotto itself is an open cave filled with amazingly blue turquoise waters. The waters are made even more stunning and vibrant thanks to the light that emanates from an underwater tunnel in the grotto. 

While the water is certainly beautiful, it is also known for being incredibly cold, although does not deter swimmers from diving in anyway. The cave is a favorite stop for people out on a hike, checking out the boulder beaches on the coast, or just looking for a nice, secret place to take in the scenery.

The Bruce Peninsula park is home to a number of bears (in fact it's logo is a bear's pawprint), so watch your step on the way to the grotto, since no water is so clear that it's worth wrestling a bear for.  

One man's singular interest and dedication to the odd art of the lithophane has resulted in this charming little museum that celebrates the art and beauty of carving art onto stone.

A lithophane is a delicate sheet of stone, usually porcelain that has been cast in the the design of detailed images that only truly reveal themselves when they are backlit. The lovely little art form became popular during Victorian times, but the practice is still employed today, even though the techniques may have changed a bit. Originally, an artist would create a shallow 3D image in wax which was then used to create a porcelain negative. When light passed through it, the image would come to life, looking like it was popping right off the stone. Today, 3D printers and etching machines are used to create often photo-realistic lithophanes.

The Blair lithophane museum in Toledo was started by one Laurel Gotshall Blair, who began collecting the panes in the early 1960s. He quickly amassed a a collection of over 2,000 of the panes and displayed them out of a museum in his home while continuing to collect more. The collection claims to be the largest of its kind in the world. Blair passed away in 1993, but not before donating his collection to his native city of Toledo. The current museum was opened in 2004.

While lithophanes are pretty distinctly Victorian in origin, they continue to be impressive artistic artifacts to this day, changing from unformed porcelain bumps to a detailed image with just a little light.  

A Breguet 14, a bi-plane bomber and reconnaissance aircraft, is photographed over enemy territory in Kortekeer in 1918. (All photos: Courtesy Yale University Press/ Mercatorfonds)

Aerial photography was a relatively new technique at the outset of World War I. Over the next four years, it became an invaluable reconnaissance tool. Cameras were developed for aerial use, but the process was still not easy. To note enemy positions accurately, clues in the resulting images, like shadows and soil displacement, had to be interpreted as well. 

As the book The Great War Seen From the Air recounts: “They took photographs from an open cockpit. The exposure had to be set manually and after every shot the glass negative had to be replaced and stored away. Meanwhile, the observer photographer combed the skies for enemy planes looking for observation planes to shoot down.” 

By 1918, the entire front was being photographed twice a day by both sides. More than a century after the beginning of World War I, these photographs show a unique perspective on the conflict and the scale of the devastation to the landscape. The following photographs are from The Great War Seen From The Air, which drew from the extensive archives at the Imperial War Museum in London, the In Flanders Museum in Ypres, and the Royal Army Museum in Brussels.

Trench patterns in Hooge, part of the Ypres Salient. For much of the war, the front line of the Salient ran through Hooge. The village was destroyed by sustained fighting, and the casualty rates for British and Commonwealth forces were around 300 per day. The massive crater at the top of the photo was caused by a British mine on July 19, 1915. It has since been filled in and today is next to a WW1 burial site, the Hooge Crater Cemetery. 

An aerial photograph of Drie Grachten, the 'three canals', taken on July 29, 1917, before the Third Battle of Ypres. Trenches and bunkers are visible on the western bank.

Ypres town center, September 1917. The Third Battle of Ypres, also called the Battle of Passchendaele, took place around Ypres between July and November of 1917 and resulted in nearly half a million casualties on both sides. The town was largely destroyed and rebuilt after the war, and is now home to the In Flanders Fields Museum and the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing. 

The town of Dikmuide, Belgium, was first attacked on October 16, 1914. By the end of the war, it had been completely destroyed.  The German bunkers are visible in the landscape. 

The cover ofThe Great War Seen From The Air: In Flanders Fields, 1914-1918. 

A "Rupert" dummy paratrooper at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. (Photo: Ella Morton)

In the hours before sunrise on D-Day, June 6, 1944, Allied soldiers sat bundled on ships and strapped into planes off the coast of Normandy, waiting for the signal to storm the beaches of German-occupied France and change the course of the war. Further east, however, D-Day operations had already begun–with a dummy drop.

In order to give the Allied invasion fleet the best chance at victory on the beaches of Normandy, German forces needed to be distracted and directed away from the invasion site. To do so, they came up with Operation Titanic, a plan in which hundreds of dummy paratroopers were dropped many miles east of the site to lure German firepower.

The dummy paratroopers, which came to be known as “Ruperts,” were made from burlap and shaped like soldiers—but much shorter at just under three feet tall. A declassified American government paradummy testing video from May 1943 assured that “field tests have shown that the actual proportions of these dummies cannot be perceived by the enemy because of the absence of background, which allows for no standard of comparison.” To someone standing on the ground, therefore, the three-foot Ruperts were just as fearsome as a standard soldier.

The full Rupert at the National WWII Museum. (Photo: Ella Morton)

According to a Rupert exhibit at the National World War II Museum, the D-Day dummies were dressed in paratrooper uniforms, including boots and helmets. In addition to the parachutes strapped to their burlap backs, each Rupert carried recordings of gunfire and exploding mortar rounds, to add to the authenticity of the simulated air attack. Drawstrings at the top of the head, wrists, and ankles allowed the dummy to be filled with straw or sand.

Operation Titanic kicked off late at night on June 5, 1944. There were three drop zones, all located north of the Seine. Two hundred dummies were dropped into the Yerville-Doudeville-Fauville-Yvetot area, 50 dummies landed around Maltot, and another 200 were dumped near Marigny. To ensure things went as planned, a team of human paratroopers from the British Special Air Service plummeted to the ground alongside their cloth counterparts. The real soldiers, says the WWII Museum, supplied "additional special effects, including flares, chemicals to simulate the smell of exploded shells, and amplified battle sounds."

A Merville Bunker Museum exhibit showing the self-destroying Ruperts, which featured simulated rifle fire and explosives. (Photo: Pajx/Wikipedia)

When the Ruperts landed, they would self-destruct, exploding into pieces and leaving just a charred white parachute behind. Because of their explode-on-landing feature, few paradummies have survived as artifacts of Operation Titanic. They do, however, occasionally pop up for auction–in 2011, an unused Rupert sold for $3,346 at a Heritage Auctions sale. 

To meet Rupert without having to make a bid, you can visit the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. In Normandy, there are also Ruperts on display at the Merville Bunker Museum, the Caen Memorial, and the Omaha Beach Memorial. 

Crates of monastery stones and statue of the King of Seville arrive in Miami. St. Bernard de Clairvaux was dismantled and shipped from Spain by William Randolph Hearst. (Photo: Bettmann/Corbis)

We had been driving through what felt like one continuous Miami strip mall for almost an hour. Our GPS promised that in a few short minutes we would reach the destination we had traveled some thousand miles to find: a Spanish monastery, from the 12th century, once inhabited by a bevy of monks, moved stone by stone across the ocean, now set in the middle of a swamp-jungle. As we passed each pawn shop, shuttered record store, and strip mall-based high school, it became increasingly plausible that perhaps the guidebooks, Wikipedia, and Catherine Zeta Jones' jarringly kinky scene from Rock of Ages had somewhat oversold whatever we were about to experience.

When the GPS told us to turn left, our earlier suspicions were confirmed. The side streets did not really offer an escape from the strip mall, but merely extended it in all directions. 

Then, suddenly, on the right, a break in the uniform storefronts. A little further on, a small sign announcing the Ancient Spanish Monastery.

At the back of the parking lot, a wrought iron gate blocked off a graceful 16th century gate just wide enough for a small truck. Mary and Bernard of Clairvaux looked down lovingly from delicate niches on either side of the gate, their gazes falling on a cluster of cats that had found shade next to the plastered support posts. It was the quintessential Southern Mediterranean/Under the Tuscan Sun vibe, except, in the background, giant tropical plants, complete with dangling vines. The trees loomed over a church, courtyard and dining hall built in the middle of nowhere in Spain almost nine centuries before. From the gate, we could see bright flowers splayed against the pitted stone, a little worse for the wear after 900 years of use, a trip across the Atlantic ocean, several fires, and a quarter-century sabbatical in the damp crates of a Bronx warehouse from the 1920s to the 1950s.

The exterior of St Bernard de Clairvaux, Miami. (Photo: Jorge Elías/flickr)

This was Medieval America—one of several dozen centuries-old buildings imported to the U.S. in the early 20th century. They lie scattered around the country, a hidden patchwork of mostly-illegal monasteries and mansions whose history has been largely forgotten. In reporting this story, Atlas Obscura dug into both scholarly and journalistic texts, and spent time on both coasts, to understand how and why a handful of the country’s most famous families spent small fortunes helping themselves to whole European buildings. The story that emerged is part caper, part mystery, and part tragedy: American robber barons snuck ancient stones out of the war-torn countryside in the dead of night, Europeans fretted over how their familiar landmarks were rapidly disappearing, and U.S. cities spent decades of the 20th century fighting over what to do with tens of thousands of displaced medieval remnants. 

How to Steal a Monastery

There are two Americans to thank for the strange fact of a 12^th century Spanish monastery’s existence only a few miles from Miami Beach: notorious plutocrat William Randolph Hearst, and his art dealer, Arthur Byne. Together, these two men thwarted Spanish authorities, angry townspeople, and all common sense to drag not one, but two monasteries to the shores of America.

In December 1926, the New York Times printed a brief article on Hearst’s importation of St. Bernard de Clairvaux, stone-by-stone, from Segovia, Spain. William Randolph Hearst was no stranger to the Times—a newspaper magnate, short-lived Congressman for New York, and perpetual tabloid fixture for his high profile romantic affairs and fights with fellow tycoons, Hearst had a proclivity for spending money in the most ostentatious, self-congratulatory ways. A regular Times reader of the era would not be surprised to hear that Hearst had imported an entire medieval building. 

The Map of Medieval America: From Florida to California, the U.S. has a whole village worth of medieval buildings hiding in plain view. Here are 20 of them, in whole and in parts, mostly open to the public as museums (or parts of museums). But this map barely scrapes the surface of the stories behind these structures, who have endured arduous journeys to their current resting places.

The complexity of that achievement was given scant space. The journalist covering the purchase included only a brief note on the obstacles Hearst faced in dismantling and moving a monastery out of Spain: “Twice during the work of removing the cloister, the villagers, banding together, drove the workingmen away on the ground that foreigners were robbing the community of its greatest treasure.” The article went on to assure readers that "the cloister will be the only precious work of art allowed to leave Spain for a law passed two months ago prohibits further exportation of works of art and ruins.”

Yet just five years later, 11 ships filled with the pieces of a second Spanish monastery bought by Hearst docked in San Francisco Bay, in spite of the new laws. Who let this happen? And why were Americans buying, shipping and reconstructing medieval European buildings in the first place?

The answer to both of these questions was, at least in part, Arthur Byne. In 1930, Byne, a renowned American dealer of Spanish art, stumbled upon the monastery of Santa Maria de Óvila, nestled in a small valley created by a bend in the River Tagua in central Spain. Byne had developed something of a complicated reputation in the country, since arriving there 20 years earlier. In 1910, Byne undertook his first trip through Spain to photograph and catalog the nation's medieval monuments. He soon earned the trust of the Spanish government and its art community and became a leading expert on Spain’s cultural heritage, even receiving recognition from the king in 1927. But at the same time, Byne was leveraging these relationships to build a bustling business in the antiquities trade, exporting furniture, fireplaces, ceilings, statues, and other Spanish treasures to his American clients. “My only role in life is taking down old works of art, conserving them to the best of my ability and shipping them to America,” Byne reflected in a 1934 letter to Julia Morgan, an architect colleague back in California.

The monastery, a home to Cistercian monks beginning in 1180, had a typically medieval monastery plan, with a series of buildings constructed around a cloister with arcaded walkways. The church sat on the north side of the cloister, while the monks’ wing attached to the east side, which included the sacristy, the library, the chapter house and probably a commons room for the monks. On the south wing opposite the church stood the refectory, kitchen, pantry, and a calefactorium (warming room). The bodega, a utilitarian building containing a long subterranean vault for wine storage, made up the monastery’s west side.

Upon encountering the site, Byne knew he had an ideal buyer in William Randolph Hearst. Hearst had a reputation as an unpredictable, but prolific, art collector; as one of his dealers assessed in a very backhanded compliment, “Nobody I have known showed simultaneously such a voracious desire to acquire and so little discrimination in doing it.” Hearst also had a particular interest in Spain. He once wrote in a letter to his mother that Spain was “a tired, worn out monarchy” prime for exploitation by foreign elites. He declared, “[we] will burst through the Pyrenees into Spain, and ravage the country. How does that strike you?”

William Randolph Hearst, c. 1906. (Photo: Library of Congress) 

However, Hearst also had a specific goal in mind for Santa Maria de Óvila. It would be part of a 61-bedroom “medieval castle” in the California wilderness, called Wyntoon Castle. Hearst was less interested in historical preservation, and his design included a swimming pool constructed from Santa Maria de Óvila’s 150-foot-long chapel with a diving board installed on the site of the former altar. The choir at the north end of the church would serve as a women’s dressing room, and the chapel's apse would be scattered with two or three feet of sand, creating a “beach” for sunbathing. After a series of exchanges with Byne, Hearst approved the purchase of the entire monastery.

From the moment Hearst agreed to shell out the cash—around $300,000 in total—Byne realized he was facing a number of challenges in moving a monastery, stone by stone, across the Atlantic Ocean to a California forest. Luckily, American money worked wonders on a weak Spanish government. 

The first, and perhaps most pressing issue, was that taking a monastery out of Spain violated a host of Spanish cultural preservation laws, many of which the Spanish government had generated in the wake of Byne’s previous antiquities-purchasing binges. “It is forbidden to ship a single antique stone from Spain today—even the size of a baseball,” Byne himself admitted. Thus, Byne took extreme precautions in keeping his project quiet. Two of Hearst’s architectural consultants, Walter T. Steilberg and Julia Morgan corresponded about the “need for secrecy in this matter.” “I am not trusting, in this talkative country, to the discretion of any typist, and shall send all of my reports in pencil…” wrote Steilberg.

One of the ways Byne convinced the Spanish government to turn a blind eye to his pillaging was by convincing the Spanish Ministry of Labor that his project was a “partial solution to the serious problem of unemployment.” In the midst of a serious Spanish economic depression, Byne hired more than 100 local townspeople to dismantle the monastery. The disassembling process went quickly, thanks to the neat construction of the site—Byne described the monastery as “a joy to take down.”

The dismantled cloister of the Monastery of Ovila, 1930s, said by Byne to be a "joy to take down". (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

But moving the many heavy stones presented a more imposing challenge. Byne needed to transport the stones across the countryside to the port, about 100 miles away. However, there were no paved roads in this part of the country, nor did it have accessible railroad networks. Undeterred, Byne found the remains of a trench railway from Paris, a leftover relic of World War I, when Allied forces needed to deliver supplies to soldiers in the trenches. The railways were less expensive to build and could be easily moved and reconstructed, allowing Byne to quickly lay down tracks in Spain. The simple, makeshift rail lines previously used to deliver critical ammunition, food, and medicine to trench-bound Allied soldiers were now being used to move metal push carts filled with ancient stones through the Spanish valley.

But building a railway to transport one rich man’s illegal purchase was not enough. Byne’s workers also needed to get the stones across the River Tagua, which ran alongside the site. Hearst’s architects, in cooperation with the local workers, developed a pulley system that used the current of the river to pull the stones along a raft connected to a series of cables. It took the workers thousands of trips, over the course of six months, to get the stones across the 100-foot river bed. 

The instability of the Spanish government provided a final challenge for Byne and Hearst. When Byne began removing the monastery in early 1931, Spain had a largely ineffective monarchy and a sluggish economy. This helped Byne convince the government that monastery exportation was a boon to the Spanish economy—creating jobs and bringing in some much needed revenue. But it also meant that the government might collapse any day, and could be replaced with a new government less willing to ignore Byne and Hearst’s antics. In a March 1931 letter, Steilberg relayed:

Mr. Byne is very anxious to just remove from the site all the carved or moulded members, as he fears interference by the authorities at any time. We presented the entire matter to the national art commission and they were entirely agreeable to him taking this forgotten and shameful neglected and abused group of buildings; but it is quite possible that some of the politicians, in an effort to discredit those in power, may bring pressure to bear through the press that would halt the work at once."

A month later, in April 1931, Byne’s fears were realized as the Spanish king fled the country, and an anti-monarchist regime came to power. But, luckily for the Americans, the Second Spanish Republic was about as effective as its predecessor when it came to protecting cultural heritage sites. Byne declared that the revolutionary Spanish government “(has) more important problems than to bother about than the demolition of an old ruin.” Time magazine later reported, “[Byne’s] workers nailed the red flag of revolution to the church they were illegally tearing down and went right on working.”

By the time the stone-laden ships arrived in the San Francisco harbor in 1931, Hearst and Byne faced a challenge even more imposing than angry townspeople and interloping Spanish bureaucrats: the Great Depression. As the stock market crashed, Hearst's net worth plummeted and his desire for a personal medieval castle with a cathedral swimming pool began to seem like a pipe dream. Estimates for the cost of completing the castle came in at around $50,000,000 and Hearst’s financial advisors finally convinced him that he could not afford to take on this expense. After all of Byne’s effort and ingenuity, Santa Maria de Óvila was retired to a warehouse, then dumped in a San Francisco park.

Why Buy A Monastery

The idea to buy a medieval building, dismantle it, ship it across an ocean, store it, and then rebuild it in a new location was not just a lavish fantasy formed in Hearst's money-addled brain and turned into reality by an army of fearful yes-men. An English antiquarian noted somewhat darkly to the Manchester Guardian in 1926 that “there [seemed] to be a craze in the United States at the moment for this sort of thing.”

He was right. Significant portions of at least 20 medieval buildings made their way across the Atlantic, almost all between 1914 and 1934. As a result of this veritable industry, medieval structures now reside or resided in major cities across the country (New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, San Francisco, and Miami), as well as in regional centers (Richmond, VA; Toledo, OH; and Milwaukee; WI), and even in the middle of nowhere (Vina, CA).

American billionaires like Hearst and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. played a significant part in this trade, but they weren't the only ones involved. Many wealthy folks seemed to consider the purchase of a medieval building a reasonable personal expense.

Segovia, Spain, where the St. Bernard de Clairvaux was originally located. The city walls date from the 8th century. (Photo: Carlos Delgado/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0) 

The buildings were not that expensive, at least for an early 20^th century American magnate. Even slightly less-rich people could afford them: An American diplomat and his heiress wife purchased a medieval English manor house and brought it to Virginia. The daughter of a railroad magnate had a Gothic chapel moved from France to her estate in Long Island, where she installed it next to a (now destroyed) Renaissance castle that she had acquired earlier. Most of the structures were little more than ruins after the Wars of Religion of the 16^th century and the nationalization of religious institutions at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19^th centuries. Governments in the 19^th century had given the buildings to local, private owners for a song.

More difficult for the prospective medieval building owner was the politics. To facilitate the legally ambiguous trade, Hearst had Byne, John D. Rockefeller had George Gray Barnard, Virginia business people used Henry G. Moore. Stealing a monastery was all about networking.

But, speaking more broadly, the desire for such properties was probably rooted in the American interest in the European past. At the beginning of the 20^th century, American elites began incorporating elements of medieval architecture into everything from universities to churches to department stores. By the time that Hearst, Rockefeller, and the others started importing medieval buildings, Americans had been collecting medieval art and sculpture in earnest for about 40 years. Americans wanted anything that could be labeled “medieval”: the sturdy, stark lines of the 11^th century Romanesque or the effusive ornament of the early 16^th century flamboyant Gothic, it didn't matter.

Nowadays, the dominant cultural expression of the Middle Ages seems to be the sex and violence of Game of Thrones. But at the turn of the century, Americans thought of the era as a time of serenity; piety; and ideal, harmonious communities. Medieval Europe had not yet suffered the traumas of industry, and medieval objects became a way to demonstrate that the capitalism of the early 20^th century had its genteel side. In the case of the 15th century Tudor manor house Agecroft Hall, the effect was supposed to be actually transformative. One pamphleteer writing about the arrival of the hall in Virginia claimed rapturously that “England [was] literally being brought to America.” She did not mean that America was claiming a part of England, she meant that part of the U.S. had been turned into a medieval English agricultural estate– an improvement.

Any coherence that the medieval buildings bought by Americans might have had in the 1920s and 1930s disappeared almost as soon as the buildings arrived in America. The Depression shifted financial priorities away from moving buildings across oceans and the fad for all things medieval had faded by World War II. The Medieval American buildings might have been acquired for similar reasons but soon after their arrival in the U.S., they began wildly disparate journeys.   

What Happens When Your Building Arrives in America

A lot could go wrong even once a medieval building finally made it to America. Geopolitics, the global economy, and public health regulations all had unexpected consequences. And, of course, there never seemed to be enough money.

Even the buildings that would become The Cloisters, that venerable model of American medievalism, faced some challenges on this side of the pond. George Grey Barnard, an American sculptor and antiquities dealer who was deeply in debt and living in France, began in 1906 to acquire large portions of four monasteries: Sant-Miquel-de-Cuixà, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, Trie-en-Bigorre, and what he thought was Bonnefont-en-Comminges. He planned to sell the buildings to wealthy individuals and institutions from New York to L.A., but plan after plan fell through. By 1913, he had few prospects and was quickly running out of time, as laws forbidding the export of French monuments would come into effect on January 1, 1914. He threw the cloisters on boats as swiftly as he could–the authorities, who knew what he was doing, tried to stop him–and got the stones out in the nick of time.

George Grey Barnard, sculptor and medieval art dealer, in 1908. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

In early 1914, these cloisters arrived in New York, and Barnard decided that he would keep them for the immediate future, creating an installation on some undeveloped land in Upper Manhattan. This predecessor to today's Cloisters proved immensely popular, with papers heralding it as the Gothic jewel of New York's cultural institutions.

By the mid-1920s, however, Barnard needed money, badly. He quietly let it be known that his cloisters, and the land they were on, were collectively for sale. Barnard's agent approached John D. Rockefeller, Jr., on March 25, 1925, and offered everything for $1 million. Barnard had bought art for Rockefeller in the past, and the two had previously discussed the creation of a great museum of medieval objects. Now, with the fate of New York's premier medieval exhibit uncertain, Barnard stressed to Rockefeller the importance of keeping his cloisters in the city if at all possible. With stronger antiquities laws in place, it could prove tricky for Rockefeller to simply go buy a new set of medieval buildings in France.

Rockefeller, a brutal negotiator, indicated his interest to Barnard's dealer and then ceased contact with them for several weeks. Rockefeller then wrote to The Metropolitan Museum of Art with an offer to buy the cloisters for the museum, eventually settling on a donation of $500,000 to buy the buildings and an additional $300,000 to maintain them. A decade earlier, The Met had promised to buy Sant-Miquel-de-Cuixà from Barnard, but backed out. This time, the sale went through, and Barnard agreed to sell his cloisters to The Met for $650,000, a sum much lower than the million-dollar offers he had entertained in 1915 and 1922. By 1933, the cloisters were moved to Fort Tryon Park and were newly combined and augmented into the complex that is The Cloisters today. 

Saint-Michel-de-Cuixa, late 1800s, prior to parts of it being dismantled and shipped to New York, where is makes up part of The Cloisters. (Photo: Bibliothèque de Toulouse/flickr)

Another Spanish monastery acquired with Hearst money veered even further off course. Before Hearst bought Santa Maria de Óvila in 1930, he had purchased another Spanish monastery: Saint Bernard de Clairvaux from Segovia, Spain. St. Bernard de Clairvaux charted a curious course from Spain to Miami by way of New York.

Byne got St. Bernard de Clairvaux out the same way he moved Santa Maria de Óvila, but this trip proved much easier. He built 40 miles of road through the mountainous Spanish countryside, hired more than 100 men and ox-cart teams to stomp down his newly laid roads, and constructed a 20-mile narrow-gauge railroad. Spain’s cultural preservation laws hadn’t been enacted yet, so Byne didn’t have to worry about interference from the authorities; he just slipped cash into the waiting hands of the dockworkers. In about a year’s time the monastery had been blueprinted, dismantled, packed into 10,571 crates and shipped to a Bronx warehouse, where it arrived in 1926. 

Then the monastery landed in the crossfire of an international public health scare. Byne’s workers packaged the pieces of monastery stone with hay to cushion the blocks during the long journey across the Atlantic—standard practice, particularly when trafficking fragile goods out of a rural region. But in 1924, the United States experienced its seventh outbreak of the unfortunately named and highly contagious "hoof and mouth disease.” Past outbreaks of the virus had devastated American agriculture, as swine, sheep, and cattle broke out in the gruesome mouth and hoof blisters characteristic of the ailment. A 1914 epidemic of hoof and mouth disease spread across the eastern and midwestern United States, forcing farmers to slaughter 200,000 diseased animals at an appraised value of almost $6 million. The USDA believed that the disease had come from overseas, as both Europe and Latin America had experienced epidemics.

When Spain experienced another eruption in 1925, the USDA was not taking any chances. American authorities figured the odds were good that the hay used to pack Hearst’s crates had been exposed to animals in Europe and demanded the quarantine of all 10,571 crates. Within a few days, government workers burned every scrap of the packaging hay in an attempt to protect America’s cows from yet another round of a foreign plague.

When the stones finally made it to the Bronx warehouse, Hearst realized he had yet another administrative catastrophe on his hands—the workers repacked the stones without returning them to their original wooden crates. The crates had departed from Spain with an identifying number and a compass direction on each crate, so that the 10,571 pieces of monastery could be reconstructed.

Now that blueprint was completely, irrevocably gone. Hearst was the overwhelmed owner of what Time magazine christened “the biggest jigsaw puzzle in history.”

St. Bernard de Clairvaux languished in the warehouse for almost 30 years while Hearst plotted his next steps. Putting the monastery back together would require both money and motivation, and by the 1930s, Hearst was running out of both. Now in possession of multiple piecemeal medieval monasteries he had neither the plans nor the resources to rebuild, Hearst begun to seek someone—anyone—to take this giant stone burden off his hands. Beginning in 1937, Hearst started liquidating his massive art collection, as the New York Times morbidly noted, “in anticipation for his death.” (A death that wouldn’t come for another 14 years.) Hearst tasked his art dealers with the work of pawning an art collection that had cost him a cool $40 million (not adjusted for inflation), and included such eccentricities as dozens of full suits of armor, an Egyptian mummy, a pair of Benjamin Franklin’s glasses, and of course, full fledged medieval monasteries. But while the suits of armor flew off the shelves (in many cases almost literally, as some of the Hearst artifact fire sales were held at department stores), a Spanish monastery in 10,000-plus pieces was a much harder sell.

The cloisters at St. Bernard de Clairvaux Church, Miami, as they look today. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons) 

But in 1952, St. Bernard de Clairvaux finally found its buyers. William Edgemon and Raymond Moss, two businessmen from Cincinnati, purchased the cloisters and shipped the crates down the east coast to Port Everglades, at a cost of $60,000. After retrieving the crates from the Florida docks, Edgemon and Moss transported the stones to north Miami Beach; they hired an expert stonemason who spent the next 19 months re-erecting the monastery at a cost of nearly $1.5 million—later assessments would say that the stonemason got the gigantic puzzle “about 90% right.”

The chosen location of Miami had its own peculiar logic, somewhat tied to the new popularity of central air conditioning. Reasoning that people might eventually get bored of the beach—or at the very least, that it might occasionally rain—new tourist attractions including amusement parks, aquariums, and a wax museum popped up around the city. The Ohio entrepreneurs banked on the monastery being beautiful and novel enough (“STEP BACK IN TIME 800 YEARS!”) to draw in some of Miami’s sunburned masses, and thus invested heavily in its reconstruction. (Similar reasoning would bring another medieval monastery to the Bahamas, too.)

The monastery never took off in the way the entrepreneurs hoped. Tourism in Miami began a downward slide in the early 1960s (due to, among other things, unseasonably cool temperatures and growing concern about drugs) and the monastery’s trickle of guests proved insufficient to recoup its enormous start up costs. In 1964, the cloister was saved from demolition when a philanthropist donated $400,000 and gave the property to the local Episcopal diocese. The Episcopalians continued to operate the site as a local attraction, but eliminated the admission fee and outfitted the locale to be a more suitable place for church services. They brought in carpets, found a new altar among Hearst’s still-for-sale possessions, and set up a church day care. The site’s new chaplain told the New York Times in 1964: “We feel we are redeeming this beautiful edifice. It has fallen very far from grace. After centuries of consecration by the prayers of the faithful, it is ignominious for it to be classified as a ‘giant jigsaw puzzle.’”

Miami of the 1950s, and future home to St. Bernard de Clairvaux. (Photo: Florida Memory/flickr)

If the tale of Hearst’s first monastery seemed complicated, his second monastery would prove no easier to unload. In the case of St. Bernard de Clairvaux, Hearst owned the Bronx warehouse, meaning that having the stones sit around wasn’t costing him much. But in San Francisco, Hearst needed to rent 28,000 square feet of warehouse space to house the crates containing Santa Maria de Óvila. With the onset of the Depression, and Hearst at real risk of bankruptcy, the tycoon could no longer afford to hemorrhage money in this manner.

Hearst’s agents began to look for a buyer, but as a Time journalist critically assessed, “(there) was probably not a sane man in the country who would have paid a reasonable price for it in 1939.”

After it became clear to Hearst that he was not going to make any money selling this monastery, he decided to try giving the stones away. In 1941, he proposed donating the stones to the City of San Francisco with the provision that the City would use them to reconstruct the original monastery buildings, and that these would form the main attraction of a Museum of Medieval Arts to be operated by the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. De Young administrators and city officials were enthusiastic; the Museum’s director Walter Heil wrote in a letter to Hearst that this was the most thrilling news he had received in his tenure in office. In anticipation for the move, Hearst took the stones out of the warehouse and had the crates placed in Golden Gate Park.

But like all previous plans for the stones, this dream too would prove short-lived. With the outbreak of World War II, municipal planning ground to a halt as government agencies refocused on defense and military operations. Directing energy to building a giant medieval museum also seemed somewhat tone-deaf when the nation was in the middle of a violent international entanglement. One museum board member recalled a heartfelt plea to the city "to reassemble the monastery's stones at a dire point in the war when courage born of faith–any faith–could be reborn and flower in the lyrically soaring arches of a resurrected Santa Maria de Óvila.” Unfortunately, just three months after Pearl Harbor, Americans were not apt to see parallels between the courage of wartime valor and the “courage” of rebuilding a European cultural site.

Monastery stones in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. (Photo: Binksternet/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Any last hope for the museum went (literally) up in smoke, after a series of fires damaged the unattended monastery stones. Between 1941 and 1959, no fewer than five inflagrations tore through the stones. Arson was heavily suspected (though never officially proven) and employees of the museum speculated the fires were related to a vocal faction of San Franciscans who did not want any construction in Golden Gate Park. This was a depressing time for Hearst’s architect, Steilberg, who was still hoping for a grand medieval structure. As Time would later note, “a kind of fatalistic lethargy seems to have settled on the California project." 

The ruins remained in Golden Gate Park until the end of the 20th century, as most people initially involved in the project either passed away or lost interest. The stones became weathered and overgrown with grass and weeds, morphing into the landscape of the park. Among their many new purposes, the stones served as a playground for children, a canvas for graffiti artists, and a site of “meditation and love” for San Francisco’s druid community.

Europeans to American Medieval Building Buyers: Drop Dead

From riots in Spain to scathing op-eds in English papers, Europeans did not let their medieval buildings sail quietly to America. In the face of energetic opposition, it is shocking how successful Americans were at taking these pieces of cultural heritage. Of course, it was sometimes legal for them to do so–barely legal, but often technically legal. England's series of Ancient Monuments Protection Acts had not defined “ancient” in such a way that encompassed Agecroft Hall and Warwick Priory, Spain did not move to forbid the export of cultural heritage until after Byne had bought his first monastery, and George Grey Barnard famously finished putting his cloisters–The Cloisters–on boats just two days before France's cultural heritage laws came into effect. However, to understand how Americans kept taking buildings and how Europeans made sense of these thefts, we need to look beyond the formal laws to the complicated and often tragic histories of the medieval buildings themselves.

Often, it came down to one critical question: How much of a building do you need to own to say that you own a building?

For something like the late Gothic chapel from the Chateau d'Herbéville, now at the Museum of Fine Arts in Detroit, the answer might be fairly simple. The nobles Jean Bayer de Boppart and his wife, Eve d'Iseberg decided they wanted one of these private chapels that were all the rage, they hired skilled craftsmen to append it to their family home, and up it went. When antiquities dealer G. T. Demotte came across the building after World War I, he removed the walls, roof, interior stone and wooden elements of the chapel from the rest of the structure—by then mostly ruins—and could market the thing as a late Gothic chapel.

The St. Joan of Arc Chapel, Milwaukee, originally built in the Rhône River Valley in France. (Photo: Emma Stodder)

Something like the monastery of Sant-Miquel-de-Cuixà is a little more complicated. Physically, it's a mass of different constructions, assembled over time. To a 9th century foundation, the monks added a church in the 10^th century that was then refurbished, then consecrated, then overshadowed by a larger church built a few years later, all of it ultimately bolstered by many additional structures in the 11^th century that helped to get more foot traffic going past the monastery in the form of pilgrims who donated and spent their way from their homelands as they traveled to Saint James of Compostela. In other places, building programs extended centuries further, into the 1400s. Americans were especially interested in Gothic and Romanesque stone–when Byne took his monasteries out of Spain, he just left the post-1200 material in ruins and in situ. 

As far as Hearst was concerned, he owned Santa Maria de Óvila after his years of toil and millions of dollars spent, all culminating in the monastery's relocation to America. In spite of the building's epic journey, many in Spain do not realize that it ever left. The remaining buildings were rebuilt on their original site decades later, yielding the extreme oddity of a medieval monastery that is apparently now in two places at once.

While these layered and often confusing histories have today resulted in an alarming metaphysical conundrum, they were very convenient for American buyers in the early 20^th century. Plus, from their perspective, they weren't stealing history–they were doing the structures a favor. Time and war had left many of Europe’s “treasures” in sad shape. In England, religious institutions like that housed at Warwick Priory were dissolved under Henry VIII in the mid-16th century. Practically, that meant that the buildings were stripped of their furnishings and their inhabitants were released from their vows and sent away. In France, the Revolution led in 1790 to the dissolution of all religious orders and the nationalization of all Church property, with devastating consequences for the buildings and their communities (as well as for historians, since many, many archives were destroyed as a result).

What wasn't destroyed, the state sold to private owners, usually for extremely low sums. One element of The Cloisters was, after 1792, used as a stable, a jail, a weapons foundry, a private residence, a garrison, and a hotel warehouse before locals dismantled the structure to make room for another hotel.

Americans and Europeans both hurled these long histories at one another when, on the one hand, staking a claim to medieval buildings and, on the other, repudiating American theft of cultural heritage. When the U.S. media reported on medieval acquisitions, they often revered American tycoons as heroic preservationists of the past. A 1936 New York Times editorial on The Cloisters praised the “patient [sic] genius” of George Grey Barnard and the “discerning and generous genius” of John D. Rockefeller Jr. in bringing the medieval sites to New York City. Both the media and the buyers of the monasteries were eager to draw connections between American and European history. “Mr. Rockefeller has helped to pay one great debt of our age to the Middle Ages by choosing to repair the Cathedral of Rheims,” opined the Times.

John D. Rockefeller, Jr., c. 1915. (Photo: Library of Congress)

World War II further cemented Americans’ belief that what Europeans had labeled “kidnapping” and “acts of thievery” actually represented actions for the good of humanity. When the Nelson Gallery of Art and Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri acquired a 13th century French cloister in 1943, one curator declared its removal from Europe as “splendid thing”, since now “we have them in this country where they are safe.”

The European side was just as entrenched. Perhaps the most brutal fight occurred over the purchase of a monastery and a great manor house by Virginians. The back-and-forth, waged through the press of each country, reached comically great heights.

In the summer of 1925, England was up in arms about the impending destruction of Warwick Priory, a group of formerly monastic buildings in the north. A meeting of the House of Commons on the subject exploded, but no political salvation could be found. The city of Warwick came up with ingenious solutions, all of which failed. It offered the buildings free of charge to the bishop of Coventry, but he refused to live so far from his flock. Undeterred, the city tried to turn the old monastery into public housing, but plans quickly fell through. 

Then, on September 25, the papers reported the shocking news that Warwick Priory had been sold–to an unnamed American. The building, once visited by Queen Elizabeth I herself, would be transported to the U.S. 

Virginia House, from the dismantled Warwick Priory, Warwickshire, England, c. 1929. (Photo: Library of Congress)

At first, news was scarce. Details only emerged a week later, when the AP cleared up “mysterious reports" by identifying the purchasers as Alexander and Virginia Weddell of Richmond, Virginia. They had bought the buildings to recreate another Warwickshire monument: Sulgrave Manor, English home of George Washington's ancestors. Facing a barrage of criticism that they were stealing a vital piece of English history, the new owners went on the attack, giving interviews far and wide to make the case that they were the best caretakers for the property. 

The Weddells developed two now-familiar rhetorical strategies. They immediately pointed out that they were doing Europe a favor by rescuing and restoring neglected treasures. Everything inside the buildings, even the stairs, had already been stripped and re-installed in an English factory. Adding insult to injury, the sale had been publicly announced and no one else had bothered to cough up the money. Alexander Weddell claimed he had never schemed to get his hands on an English home, he just happened upon the announcement when reading the newspaper his sandwich had been wrapped in.

Second, the Weddells explained, with the help of the American media, how Warwick Priory would fit in as well in Virginia as in Warwickshire. Papers on both sides of the Atlantic fixated on the fate of the priory for more than a year, from the first shipment of material from England to the U.S. on November 28, 1926, to breathless reports that the Weddells' new home was nearing completion on May 8, 1927.

Each report brought with it new details, many of which strained credulity. The New York Times wrote that Virginia Weddell herself was a descendant of George Washington's family in an article titled "American Buys Warwick Priory As Shrine Here to Washington." Another paper speculated that Warwick Priory would yield 6,000 to 10,000 tons of brick and stone for the replica from the exact same quarry that had supplied material for Washington's ancestral home. The Boston Globe's long profile detailed the centuries of close friendship enjoyed by the Washingtons and the owners of Warwick Priory before the colonists came to America. 

The interior of Virginia House, 1929. (Photo: Library of Congress) 

Virginia Weddell herself waded into the fantasy of Warwick Priory as not just an English building, but a proto-American one. She reminisced about how the ships sailing with the building materials followed the same trail that the colonists had taken when they came to Virginia, where they built English-style houses of their own. "True, those brave pioneers started from Blackwell, near London; but their little ships, the Sarah Constant, the Godspeed and the Discovery, passed Old Point Comfort, as will my ship; and the Priory is to be unloaded at a point not far removed from the landing place of Captain John Smith."

While all of this glorification of a new, medieval monument to George Washington was going on, a new scandal was brewing in Britain. On January 25, 1926, the chairman of the Manchester Art Gallery Committee told a meeting of the Ancient Monuments Society that he had received a letter from an American correspondent. The letter asked if it was true that the great manor Agecroft Hall had been purchased and would be dismantled and shipped to America. 

It was Warwick Priory all over again. The society's secretary, John Swarbrick, immediately went to see the purported seller of the house, who confirmed that the rumors were true: A Mr. T.C. Jackson, Jr., of Elizabeth, New Jersey, had purchased the hall and it would be moved to New Jersey imminently. Swarbrick warned in an interview that there was a craze for medieval buildings in the U.S., that the same people involved in Warwick Priory were responsible for the sale of Agecroft Hall, and that more purchases of the kind were underway.

Agecroft Hall, in Richmond, Virginia. (Photo: Fopseh/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0) 

Swarbrick was wrong about almost everything, though it was true that the architect Henry G. Moore participated in both purchases. Moore had found the building for Richmond businessman T. C. Williams, Jr., who wanted it for his Virginia–not New Jersey–estate. Williams was enthusiastic not so much about the (non-existent) colonial connections, but about the opportunity to recreate a pre-industrial haven along the lines of the medieval English village. There would be no skyscrapers, no intensity of urban industrial life, nothing but idyllic communities and authentically "Old English" country homes—the aesthetic apparently being a critical component of both the lifestyle and the values it implied.

Two great houses pillaged by Americans in less than six months was too many for the English. In 1926, the Manchester Guardian ran several dozen editorials and letters to the editor decrying the sale and removal of Agecroft Hall. One editorial called for stronger laws to protect British landmarks, calling it “a national loss”: “Warwick Priory is gone. Agecroft Hall is going. No building of decent age and character is safe from the danger of kidnapping.” Another editorial labeled the sale “a raid.” The sale of Agecroft Hall and Warwick Priory even prompted the House of Lords to debate a law forbidding the export of English cultural heritage (opponents weren't comfortable telling people what they could do with their private property), though the Ancient Monument Protection Act was not strengthened until 1931. 

The Elizabethan knot garden at Agecroft Hall. (Photo: Fopseh/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0) 

In spite of all this rancor, the kinds of arguments that the Weddells and Williams made seem to have struck a chord. Agecroft Hall, like Warwick Priory, had been in sad shape when it was purchased by an American. The Industrial Revolution left the hall uninhabitable. Coal pits surrounded the house; a freight railway skirted the buildings. One British writer turned his criticism of the sale inward, calling filthy, despoiled Agecroft Hall "too reproachful a jewel to leave in that ruined landscape."

Medieval Buildings Home to Roost 

Americans did, for the most part, make good on their promises to preserve these sites. By the 21st century, almost all of the medieval buildings brought to America had ended up in museums—some in well-endowed East Coast institutions with entire wings dedicated to medieval art and devoted to “transporting guests back in time to the Middle Ages,” others in small Midwestern galleries, with a handful of medieval pieces thanks to a local bigwig’s fleeting interest in the period. A few, like the Hearst buildings in California and Miami, are slightly more accessible, but are still framed by exhibitions and have a museum-y look-but-don't-touch air about them for most visitors. The uniformity of the sites today stand in stark contrast to the variety of uses envisioned by those who brought medieval buildings to the U.S., or the experiences of the buildings throughout the 20th century: They were or might have been tourist traps, chapels, swimming pools, museums, private residences, piles of rubble in warehouses and in parks.

By the late 20th and early 21st centuries, many different communities had become deeply invested in the medieval buildings that by then littered the American landscape. The effect of the historical bricolage sometimes borders on the surreal. Agecroft Hall was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 because it reflected the “social and aesthetic ideals of upper-class Virginians in the 1920s,” not so much because of its medieval heritage. The final nomination form noted that it was “unaltered” and in its “original site;” its period “1900-” and significance fell under the “agriculture” and “community planning” categories.

Photograph of the central yard surrounded by the cloisters of the St. Bernard de Clairvaux Church, Miami. (Photo: Rolf Müller/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

There were occasional calls for repatriation of the sites mentioned here to Europe, but the medieval European buildings eventually became too entangled in America to be so easily returned. In 1940, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco demanded the return of the monasteries that Hearst, in his words, stole, but nothing was done. More recent and sustained calls for repatriation of The Cloisters buildings to France faced criticism from no less than the eminent social theorist Jean Baudrillard, who used the medieval buildings in America as a case in his Simulacra and Simulation. Baudrillard thought that by this point “demuseumification [was] nothing but another spiral in artificiality;” The Cloisters were already artificial, returning Sant-Miquel-de-Cuixàto to its original site would be even more so, “a total simulacrum.” Leaving the cloister in New York “in its simulated environment… fooled no one,” while moving it was a “supplementary subterfuge,” a “retrospective hallucination.”

The retroactive reality Baudrillard described did not come to pass. The buildings continue vibrant and multiple lives within American communities today. At two sites that we visited, Ancient Spanish Monastery in Miami, and the Abbey of New Clairvaux in Vina, California, extensive preservation efforts were matched with a variety of contemporary roles. In these transposed places, community members meet, families pray, people hold weddings and funerals and, of course, yoga classes.

In the 1970s, the stones of Santa Maria de Óvila at long last, caught a break. A Cistercian monk named Thomas X. Davis heard about the remains of the monastery, and became interested in bringing them to his abbey, about three hours north of San Francisco in the small town of Vina, California. His timing overlapped fortuitously with the research of Dr. Margaret Burke, an art historian who received funding from the Hearst Foundation to study the stones. Burke began categorizing the stones, determining what part of the monastery they would have originally belonged to, and in 1984, offered the city a comprehensive report of each stone, its condition, and whether it could be preserved. Meanwhile, the monks continued requesting that the city take their proposal seriously. After extensive discussions between the monks, the De Young Museum, and the city, the museum’s trustees agreed to relinquish control of the stones in 1992. Two years later, the stones begun their journey to Vina–but even this short trip had its hurdles. Father Davis reported that on several occasions, individuals who opposed the stones leaving San Francisco pushed the stones off their pallets during the night, leaving workers to reload the trucks in the morning.

View from within the 800-year-old chapter house brought from Santa Maria de Ovila, now at the Abbey of New Clairvaux in Vina CA. (Photo: Frank Schulenburg/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Though the monks took the majority of the stones to Vina, some remnants stayed behind in Golden Gate Park. Debates about what constituted an “appropriate use” for the leftover stones continued into the 21st century. A 2001 investigation into the stones in SF Weekly, noted that though most of the materials had gone to Vina, there had been an "odd truce” negotiated among the park, the De Young museum, and the monastery regarding the remaining abbey stones. For nearly 50 years, the gardeners of Golden Gate Park had access to their own private quarry of ancient limestone, which they could use whenever the park needed a new retaining walls or landscaping decoration. For instance, some of the stones became part of a decorative rock wall at the Strybing Arboretum library. “We think the wall that we constructed outside the library is the most sensitive use yet,” said Scott Medbury, a park employee. What one art historian labeled “the worst act of desecration of a medieval monument during the last half-century,” the city lauded as a practical and thoughtful use for the materials that had sat abandoned for the majority of the 20^th century.

So what to make of the current state of these medieval buildings-as-museums? Certainly, good preservation practices will ensure a long life for the aged stones. But there is also a sense in which the medieval buildings have been deadened by their modern lives as display pieces. Old material given life through new use, called spolia, is, after all, very medieval. The altar at Sant-Miquel-de-Cuixà, the very heart of the religious life of the monastery, was itself made of part of a Roman column. Reuse did not erase the old meaning, it augmented the new one, though of course that column did not mean the same thing to a medieval person as to a Roman, nor the library wall the same thing as a medieval one. Even now, many San Franciscans shared memories of crawling over the medieval stones in their park as children, of the blocks as meeting places and landmarks. On the other hand, maybe the distinction between the museumified version of these places and their "freer" state is not so different, since New Yorkers were equally eager to share memories of their childhood trips to The Cloisters.

But even in Vina, at a monastery that exudes austerity and age, traces of 2015 slip through. The monks, concerned about the challenges of recruiting young men to the brotherhood, have taken to Instagram (@monksofvina) where they update their followers on paintings in progress, their 3:30 a.m. prayer meetings, and the status of the harvest. Common hashtags include #monks, #cistercian, #monastic, and #monkslife. In Miami, too, the medieval buildings live modern lives. The site’s cloistered halls have become the backdrop for such pop culture gems as the spectacular flop of a 2011 Charlie’s Angels TV reboot, a scene in the 2012 film Rock of Ages in which Catherine Zeta Jones sings “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” and Rick Ross’ music video for “Ten Jesus Pieces.”

But for every Victoria’s Secret catalog photo shoot, the Miami monastery also sees a steady flow of more ordinary life events–the monastery receives 50,000 visitors a year, and hosts 200 weddings annually. People are free to wander throughout the monastery when it isn't being used for pilates or baptisms. The medieval history of the site isn't absent from these events, though, it's often omnipresent: one woman at the monastery enthusiastically told us that she had had three of her children baptized at the monastery because she was so impressed with the site's history and the effort to move it from Spain to America. In typical Miami fashion, the conspicuous and the commonplace often careen wildly into one another–the priest of the monastery’s Episcopalian congregation mentioned that in the first wedding he officiated at the monastery he noticed a familiar-looking bridesmaid–Britney Spears. It’s hard to imagine a more American fate for these medieval stones. 

Medieval America received funding from History in Action, an American Historical Association/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation initiative at Columbia University.

Your only responsibility to celebrate is to online shop. (Photo: Pixabay/Public Domain)

A holiday named “Bare Sticks” may not sound very celebratory, but it might be the most important day in the year for shoppers in the world's most populated country. Known in English as “Singles’ Day” (in Chinese, literally “bare sticks”), November 11th in China has become the greatest commercial success ever witnessed—or manufactured. 

Singles’ Day falls on 11/11 (single-single-single-single), and in 2014, it brought in $9.34 billion in a 24-hour period of online sales for Alibaba, a Chinese company similar to eBay and Amazon founded in 1999. That is more than three times the 2014 Cyber Monday sales revenue for all U.S. merchants combined, and this year, Alibaba is gearing up for yet another record-breaking e-commerce carnival. The company's chairman, Jack Ma, now says that he wants “Double 11”—a new term trademarked by Alibaba in 2012—to become a global holiday. 

In the hours leading up to “Singles’ Day,” or “Double 11,” web-savvy Chinese, no matter what their marital status, load up their virtual shopping carts and wait until midnight to snatch deals and steals. But back in the early 1990s when the “holiday” first took shape, Singles' Day was very much an offline solace for actual single people. A small group of students at Nanjing University are said to have chosen 11/11 as a day that singles could do activities like karaoke together. By the late 2000s, Singles’ Day was widely known, sometimes called Bachelors’ Day, either because its initial creators were men or because of China’s massive gender imbalance. Yet it wasn’t until 2009 that Alibaba revamped 11/11 into today’s wild shopping spree, cleverly capitalizing on the holiday lull between China’s National Day in September and Spring Festival in February.  

Where dreams come true: an online shop storage and transportation center in China. (Photo: junrong/shutterstock.com)

Some singles see the day as an opportunity to pamper themselves (since no one else is doing it for them); others see it as a time to hang out with friends; and yet others see it as a chance to bring an end to their solo status, through speed dating or gift giving. Yet singlehood is more often stigmatized than celebrated, which is one reason that Alibaba coined the neutral “Double 11” label. Of course, the online giant, which runs the popular shopping sites Tmall and Taobao, is also trying to monopolize Double 11 revenue by leveraging the new trademark to make legal threats. We're looking at the world’s biggest population of online shoppers (193 million), still only a fraction of China’s current internet users (538 million), which is just a sliver of China’s total population (over 1.4 billion). Alibaba wants to reel in and rule them all.

But can Singles’ Day, or Double 11, really go global? And is it possible to construct a holiday practically from scratch?

More and more Chinese with expendable income + the internet = e-commerce bonanza. (Photo: chillchill_lanla/shutterstock)

“The history of holidays that started that recently is quite limited,” says John Deighton of Harvard Business School, who specializes in consumer behavior and digital marketing. “I would say that holidays are very tough to build from scratch. They’re part of long histories deeply woven into the culture of communities.” Deighton mentions Kwanzaa and Hanukkah as newer holidays that exist in relation to other things within a shifting landscape of social relations. “Most things don’t simply come into being because somebody in a boardroom decided it would happen; it’s usually a case of putting a spark into something already flammable," he says.

Even Hallmark can’t create its own holidays, something they clarify on their page, “‘Hallmark Holidays’: Not Invented Here!” The greeting card company explains: “Hallmark must respond to what people want, not the other way around… Congressional resolutions, proclamations, religious observances, cultural traditions and grassroots leadership by ordinary people create holidays.”

Singles’ Day is founded upon none of these things. It was a half-born caterpillar when Alibaba transformed it into a massive money-making butterfly, and it sort of seems that some chums in a boardroom did just get together and decide to fabricate a holiday.

But Deighton doesn’t think Double 11 will catch on elsewhere. “I think it would be monumental and really surprising if anyone could create a Singles’ Day event in U.S. culture,” he tells me. It certainly doesn’t help that November 11 is Veteran’s Day, when holiday season is already in swing. “My argument isn’t completely intact—it’s hard to predict something for which there’s so little to go on, “ he says. “But boy would that be remarkable.”

Remarkable, indeed—and turns out some people already on it. Inspired by China’s Singles’ Day success, a group in West Hollywood, California has launched an American version of the event, a day that says, “Hey, all you single people—we love you!” Their inaugural celebration took place on January 11, 2014, and they believe Singles’ Day is something that people are more than ready for. They’re aiming to make 1/11 an official American holiday, “a day of recognition for those who find themselves on the other side of the couple’s fence—by happenstance or by choice, temporarily or for life.” Their website points out that the U.S. is more single now than ever, with the number of unmarried Americans at a record high. So far they haven't gained much traction, but who knows? Maybe Target will come to the rescue and take it over.

So, is a holiday really all that hard to create? It depends, perhaps, on what counts as a holiday. There are plenty of sort-of-holidays like Mothers and Fathers day and pseudo-holidays like National Donut Day and National Dress Up Your Pet Day, but no one considers those—or Black Friday and Cyber Monday—true holidays.

What about if Amazon declared, for instance, May 27 as "You Do You Day"? A holiday of sales and self-appreciation that Walt Whitman could really get behind—its slogan could be “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and buy things for myself!” Finally, an excuse to indulge and pamper yourself rather than spend money on others, et voilà—suddenly we've got a new holiday.

Goodnight, sweet Gum Wall. (Photo: jareed/Flickr)

For 20 years, the Gum Wall in downtown Seattle has been growing into a sticky technicolor mural bonded together by hundreds of thousands of strangers' saliva. Today, everything changes. Today, the Gum Wall gets scrubbed clean.

The Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority (PDA), which manages the waterfront market where the Gum Wall stands, announced that the wall will be washed in order to protect the integrity of its bricks. The estimated million wads of chewing gum will be removed beginning at 8 a.m. PST on November 10 in a steam-cleaning process that is expected to take three to four days.

November 9, 1989: the Berlin Wall begins to fall. November 10, 2015: the Gum Wall gets scrubbed. (Photo: Anupam_ts/Flickr)

The tradition of sticking chewed-up gum wads to the wall was established in the '90s, when people would line up in the alley to buy tickets to improv shows at the Market Theater. Soon, visitors and locals alike began to add their own masticated globs to the wall, eventually creating an eight-foot-high, 54-foot-wide artwork that was equal parts alluring, fascinating, and gross. 

Though the bricks will be thoroughly scrubbed, the Gum Wall is not gone forever. PDA Director of Communications and Marketing Emily Crawford said in the announcement that the beloved "crowd-sourced piece of public art" will live on—it's just "time to start with a clean canvas."

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

Last known as the Longhorn Grill, the abandoned commercial space in Amado, Arizona that makes visitors walk through the nose hole of a giant longhorn skull is one of the most iconic buildings in the area, even if it has been pretty much abandoned. 

The building, which is sculpted to look like a colossal cow skull resting against a huge boulder, was built in the 1970s by an enterprising entrepreneur who clearly knew the power of both novelty architecture and giant skulls. While it was most recently a restaurant, the building had actually been a bait shop, a clothing store, and a roofing company. Although none of those businesses seemed as appropriate for the space as the steakhouse it became in 1993.

The Longhorn Grill operated until 2012, when it finally faced foreclosure and had to be sold at auction. As late as 2013, the space was said to have been used for parties and the like, but it seems to still be largely out of commission.

Despite this, the proudly Western roadside icon remains to this day. The concrete, rebar, and stucco that the 30-foot tall horns are made of continues to hold up despite years under the Arizona sun. You can still go and take you picture outside of it, just don't try to go inside. Trespassing in giant abandoned skulls is never a good idea.     

The entrance to Iwahig Prison and Penal Farm. (Photo: Audra Williams)

The signs for Iwahig Prison and Penal Farm in the Philippine city of Puerto Princesa start about a five-minute drive from the gate:

A PRISON WITHOUT WALLS IS LIKE A CELL WITH A KEY

It takes a few readings to parse the message. Most people don't have a point of reference for a prison without walls. Most people don't have a point of reference for a prison as a tourist destination, either. But Iwahig Prison and Penal Farm is both of those things: a place where incarcerated men move fairly freely over 64,000 acres and members of the public can come meet them, dance with them, and buy their handicrafts.

The souvenir shop, which sells handicrafts made by the prisoners. (Photo: Cheryll Del Rosario/flickr)

Surrounded by mountains rather than walls, Iwahig is twice the size of Paris. Visitors arrive by rented tricycle, or with the help of a tour guide. “Welcome to Iwahig Prison and Penal Colony” is spelled out in brightly colored rocks at the gates, which makes it feel more like the Heidelberg Project than Sing Sing. After a quick stop at security, there is a scenic 10-minute drive past rice paddies, makeshift stores, coconut plantations, corn fields, and countless dogs and goats before arriving in what resembles a town square.

Entrance to the post exchange. (Photo: Cheryll Del Rosario/flickr)

Just like any civic hub, there is a church, a post office, and a recreation center, all surrounded by lots of men working and chatting. Medium Security inmates wear brown t-shirts, and Minimum Security inmates wear blue. It’s not immediately evident if anyone is a member of staff, save for a middle-aged woman who drives through purposefully on a motorcycle. The recreation center is home to the dance rehearsal and performance space, and otherwise functions as a big souvenir shop.

The recreation center. (Photo: Cheryll Del Rosario/flickr)

Half a dozen inmates launch into a dance routine at the arrival of new guests, to Bruno Mars’ "Just The Way You Are." Most of them appear to be in their mid-20s, and at least a couple of them are lipsynching earnestly along with the song. After their performance, they are quick to lead visitors towards the specific handicrafts they have made themselves. Ninety percent of the proceeds from sales are used to keep the prison self-sustaining, but the remaining 10 percent goes to the inmates directly.

The inmates dancing. (Photo: Jarius Khan)

Iwahig has 10 pages of visitor reviews on TripAdvisor. A handful of these complain about how pushy the inmates are, particularly when encouraging tourists to buy their goods. In reality, the sales tactics are no more aggressive than at any open-air market or even shopping mall. The only difference at Iwahig is that the inmates are covered in homemade tattoos (some of them quite stunning) and will offer similar body art to visitors in exchange for a pack of cigarettes and a cup of coffee.

Crafts made by inmates. (Photo: Cheryll Del Rosario/flickr) 

When the inmates give visitors a tour, the contrast between the Maximum Security facilities and the rest of the grounds becomes clear. Three hundred Maximum Security inmates were crammed in a small, dilapidated building, with several guards out front and “NO FIXERS” signs everywhere. These are a result of the Anti Red Tape Act of 2007, legislative measures intended to stop bribery and corruption in government-operated agencies.

Some of the inmates at Iwahig. (Photo: Matt Paish)

The rest of the grounds, however, feel just like strolling around any real-world village. Men play ping pong on the ground floor of a big wooden building, while “five-six-seven-eight” (a familiar refrain for any dancer) echoes out of an upstairs room. Medium Security inmates live dormitory-style, a few hundred to a room, while Minimum Security inmates are allowed to live in a small hut with their family and farm and fish with little supervision.

Iwahig wasn’t always made up of huge open spaces and the potential for inmates to walk freely. Founded in 1904 as a way to get political prisoners far from the nation’s capital during an American occupation, it comprised 60 inmates and one guard, who were sent to a nearly uninhabitable piece of land on Palawan. The inmates were then used as free labor to clear out the rainforest to allow for further development of the island. Forty-two years later, after the Treaty of Manila relinquished US control of the islands, inmates who had completed their sentences were allowed to clear and keep for themselves up to to six hectares of land.

Now, Iwahig's 3000 or so inmates come from all around the Philippines, most of them serving long sentences for violent crimes. The rest of the population is made up of on-site prison staff and the inmates' wives and children. As the prisoners tend to be serving decades-long sentences, many of them have children who were born at the penal farm and have never lived anywhere else. Some of those children have gone on to have children of their own, a second generation who have never been outside of Iwahig. There is a school on-site, where children, staff, and inmates learn side-by-side.

(Photo: Arlene Paredes/flickr)

“The children are happy here, as if they were free,” a mother tells French filmmakers Alexandre Leborgne and Pierre Barougier in the 2006 documentary Out of Bounds. The film presents the story of Alejandro, a long-time inmate who acts as a “mayor” of the prisoners, who is soon to be released. Unlike the view you get as a tourist, watching it gives a much better sense of what it is like to be housed at the prison.

A still from the documentary film Out of Bounds, about Iwahig. (Photo: Courtesy Alexandre Leborgne)

When inmates arrive at Iwahig, they spend six months in Medium Security, before being eligible for Minimum Security freedoms. Infractions like drinking and smoking can send them back to Medium. There is bureaucracy and tedium, just like anywhere else. The Minimum Security long-timers supervise the work of their Medium Security counterparts, help them navigate the prison’s administration system, and advocate on their behalf. The tone is scolding, but their core motivation seems to be genuine concern.

Even though any inmate serving a long sentence has the option of going to Iwahig, not everyone wants to. It is far from home for most people, and long days spent farming or fishing pay between 100 and 200 pesos a month, the equivalent to a couple of packages of cigarettes. The number of inmates allowed to sleep with their families has dwindled to 20 after a 2014 escape plan saw at least one prisoner go free.

Still, the recidivism rate is only 10 percent—half of what it is in the rest of the country. As one of the inmates says in Out of Bounds: “My life could have been ruined, if I had not been sent to Iwahig.”

A particularly saucer-y lenticular cloud, over Dublin in June. (Photo: Omnisource5/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 4.0) 

This past weekend, eerie shadows passed over Cape Town, South Africa. Those who looked up saw huge puffy saucers hovering overhead, their dark underbellies promising either rain or aliens. In preparation, everyone hauled out their #UFO hashtags, as is customary around the globe.

 

It is time

These particular flying objects actually can be ID'd: they're lenticular clouds. This cloud type, which gets its name from the Latin word for "lens-like," is formed when strong, wet winds cool and condense as they blow over large obstructions, explains National Geographic's Brian Clark Howard. That's why you can often find them downwind of big landscape features, like Cape Town's Table Mountain.

 

Did you notice the UFO's flying over #capetown yesterday? 👽 Photo by @mijlof 📷

A photo posted by Instagram South Africa (@instagram_sa) on Nov 8, 2015 at 11:56pm PST

Local legend offers a different explanation, saying that the puffs are from a smoking contest between the devil and a Dutch pirate named Van Hunks. "It is said that Van Hunks won the competition but the Devil challenged him to a re-match," which accounts for the frequent stream of huge puffs, explains a local guidebook. 

UFOs and pirates aside, these particular clouds abducted no one. Instead, observers beamed their pictures up to Instagram, a good place to see the invasion's progression.

 

Did you notice the UFO's flying over #capetown yesterday? 👽 Photo by @mijlof 📷

A photo posted by Instagram South Africa (@instagram_sa) on Nov 8, 2015 at 11:56pm PST

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to edit@atlasobscura.com.

The Double R Diner found an uncannily perfect setting in Twede’s Cafe — before it was Twede's Cafe, and before Twede's Cafe took a hiatus from being the Double R Diner.

Built in 1940, the restaurant that would become Twede’s Cafe opened to the public as Thompson’s Diner the following year. It was taken over a decade or so later by new owners, who changed the name to the Mar-T Cafe, installed the now-iconic exterior neon sign (hence the large “Mar-T” hovering unacknowledged above the Double R’s sign), but otherwise left both the building and the decor largely unchanged.

Thus, when shooting on the original Twin Peaks series began in 1989, the Mar-T Cafe was well equipped to serve as the noir Americana backdrop to romantic and investigatory intrigue in Lynch’s haunted mountain town. Its tobacco brown wood panelling, horseshoe lunch counter, and chrome-and-vinyl stools appeared in the series pilot as well as the later prequel film Fire Walk With Me, and served as the model for the Hollywood sound stage set where all other Double R Diner interior scenes were actually shot.

Once Twin Peaks hit the air, the Mar-T Cafe saw a major influx of business. Fans of the show flocked to the diner; pastry crews churned out pies in a vain attempt to keep up with demand; waitresses fielded nonstop requests for “damn fine coffee” with patience and grace. By the late 1990s, however, the mania had waned, and the restaurant was sold in 1998 to Kyle Twede (pronounced “tweetie”), who renamed it — you guessed it — Twede’s Cafe.

The newly rebranded FDR-era diner would be short-lived, however, as a fire gutted the Packard Mill — sorry, I mean Twede’s Cafe, in July of 2000. The fire was the result of arson. News reports from the time of the incident described the perpetrators as burglars who had set the blaze to cover up their theft of $450. However, in an interview from May of this year, Kyle Twede described the arsonists as kids who had broken into the to restaurant mess around and drink wine coolers and then, fearing they would get in trouble for their actions, decided to set the place on fire (an apparent reference to a separate incident in 1997).

Whatever the case may be, the interior was completely destroyed. While the structure and the exterior neon sign remained, Twede’s Cafe reopened in 2001 with an updated interior that looked nothing like the Double R Diner. Since then, it has been proudly serving its Snoqualmie Valley patrons while also bitterly disappointing its Twin Peaks-minded visitors, journalist and civilian alike.

However, as of September of this year, the old Twede’s/Mar-T/Thompson’s Diner is back. As part of the production of the new season of Twin Peaks (and on the production company’s dime), the interior of Twede’s Cafe has been fully restored to the moody, campy diner of our fondest Lynchian memories. The restaurant will once again serve as the shooting location for the Double R Diner. The renovations are reportedly permanent, and will stay in place after shooting wraps. So call a meeting of the Bookhouse Boys, or maybe just ask your estranged wife to help you get out of prison on work release: the Double R Diner has returned.

Three two-tailed melusines with mirrors. (Photo: cea +/flickr)

On a late October morning, the wind howls through the winding streets of ancient Otranto. Whitecaps curl up from a bright blue sea, smashing against the fortified walls of the southern Italian city. Otranto was once considered the easternmost tip of Western civilization, with just under 50 miles of Mediterranean sea separating the city from Albania. From the city’s bay, Crusaders left on missions to the Orient, early Christian travelers returned from pilgrimages to Jerusalem, and in the 15th century, the Ottoman Turks launched their attack on the city. All of these parties passed by the Otranto Cathedral at some point during their journey.

In the sunlight, the exterior of the cathedral is golden. The structure, built in 1088, is simple, with a few arched windows and carved capitals. But inside, wild animals, biblical characters, and fantastical creatures cavort across the cathedral floor. A monk named Pantaleone and his team of artisans created the enigmatic mosaic in the 1160s. It’s one of the largest in Europe and depicts all the important stories and figures of the time: the Tree of Life, the expulsion from Eden, Alexander the Great, elephants, sphinxes, centaurs, and much more.

How all of these stories and images from distant cultural traditions made their way onto the mosaic is still a mystery. But most intriguingly–at least for the contemporary coffee consumer–is a detailed image of a long-locked, sweetly smiling, twin-tailed mermaid.

The interior of Otranto Cathedral. (Photo: Lupiae/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Indeed, she looks a lot like the stylized green lady gazing staring serenely back at you from the white cup on your desk holding your cooling coffee. Though Starbucks claims that their image was originally drawn from a 16th century Norse woodcut, a little exploring reveals that the world’s most famous mermaid was famous long before the 16th century–and long before Starbucks.

On the backs of a male and female elephant, the Tree of Life stretches towards the apse of the church, with various stories documented on the branches of the tree. One segment is a medieval calendar, depicting every month of the year with its zodiac sign and related activities: for example, in September, a peasant pounds grapes with his feet underneath an image of Virgo. Another segment depicts heaven and hell, with punishments similar to those that would be described 200 years later in Dante’s Inferno. The fabled King Arthur rides his horse next to Cain and Able, laborers construct a soon-to-crumble Tower of Babel, the Roman goddess Diana shoots a deer, and in the mosaic version of a medieval bestiary, sphinxes and lions claw at one another.

With stories and symbols drawn from the Bible, the Koran, Greek mythology and medieval stories, the mosaic is a testament to the diversity of ideas that circulated in southern Italy during the Middle Ages.

The exterior of Otranto Cathedral. (Photo: Angelica Calabrese)

Inhabited since in the 8th century BC, with a strategic position at the center of a rich trade between the East and the West, Otranto would clock time as a part of the Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Norman empires. The Cathedral, commissioned by the city’s Norman rulers for completion by local Greek-Italian monks, combines early Christian, Byzantine, and Romanesque styles. Otranto was also home to a thriving Jewish community from its inception, and some hypothesize that Kabbalah is the key to understanding the unusual mosaic.

The twin-tailed mermaid is located in a section of the mosaic typically thought to represent virtues to aspire to and vices to steer clear of, in the form of various mythical creatures and historical figures. Along with a unicorn, a leopard, an elephant, the Queen of Sheba, and others, the mermaid likely served to remind the many travelers who passed through the cathedral to beware the temptations, carnal and otherwise, that might lead them to stray from their path.

The twin-tailed mermaid mosaic at Otranto Cathedral.  (Photo: Angelica Calabrese)

But in cities such as Otranto, with long histories of various rulers, cultures, and belief systems, no interpretation is certain, and it’s nearly impossible to trace the precise origin of an image like the twin-tailed mermaid. In many different ancient civilizations, from West Africa to Mesopotamia, the mermaid was a fertility symbol uniting man and nature. The first recognizable mermaid image appears on an Assyrian palace in 800 BC, with later cameos in Homer’s The Odyssey, and Etruscan funerary urns from 300 BC. Others claim the mermaid is related to Sheela-Na-Gig, a fertility symbol found in Ireland and Britain, and still others say that she may have been inspired by the allure of women from Eastern countries.

The particular split-tailed and long-locked mermaid whose descendants populate coffee cups all over the world first appears on the mosaic floor of a cathedral in Pesaro, Italy. This mosaic was created during the Byzantine era, in the 7th century. Five hundred years later, she became a focal part of the mosaic in the Otranto Cathedral.

It’s difficult to know where else she might have been depicted in the centuries in between, what mosaics and sculptures and frescoes may have been lost over time. But Otranto was a highly trafficked port city at the time, and it is possible that the image in the cathedral may have inspired other artists and travelers.

The mosaic's depiction of Satan in hell. (Photo: Angelica Calabrese)

Also popular in port cities like Venice, by the 13th century the twin-tailed mermaid began to travel through Europe. She became a crucial member of the medieval “bestiary,” a collection of animals used to decorate church capitals, porticoes, and religious texts. These fantastical figures served to warn men and women against the vices condemned by the medieval church, like temptation, greed, and pride. In the 14th century, a French text was published that described the story of Melusine, a beautiful queen whose bottom half became serpentine while she bathed; this character soon became associated with the twin-tailed siren.

When Starbucks was preparing to open its doors in 1971, the founders were in search of an image that could represent their fledgling Seattle coffee company. “There was a lot of poring over old marine books going on,” Starbucks staff writer Steve M. wrote in a 2011 blog post, and “suddenly, there she was: a 16th century Norse woodcut of a twin-tailed mermaid, or siren.”

The original Starbucks logo. (Photo: Blanca Garcia Gil/flickr)

While some have tried to track down the “16th century Norse woodcut” from which the original image was culled, others, like blogger Carl Pyrdum, argue that such a woodcut never existed. “By the time woodcut images on paper arose in medieval Europe, around 1400 give or take a decade, there weren’t any people that you could properly call ‘Norse,’” he writes in a post on Got Medieval.

The “woodcut” was likely drawn from an image of Melusine, who was popular in France and Northern Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries. This first siren had bare breasts, a plump stomach with a belly button, and promiscuously splayed tails, though redesigns have hidden these features. Howard Schultz, the businessman who transformed Starbucks into a contemporary global coffee empire, described her as “barebreasted and Rubenesque,” in his book Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time.

Today's Starbucks logo. (Photo: Noel Reinhold/flickr)

The mermaid was supposed to be “as seductive as the coffee itself,” he writes. Seductive, yes–but a medieval consumer confronted with the symbol would have known that she was a reminder to resist temptation, rather than to succumb to it. According to the company’s website, Starbucks also believed the siren’s image could “capture the seafaring history of coffee and Seattle’s strong seaport roots.”

Seen on the logos across the world as well as in the mosaic of the Otranto Cathedral, the siren is a potent symbol of globalization–but a globalization that was thriving long before Starbucks came around. With her roots (or rather, her tails) in the Mediterranean basin, she is the inevitable production of the countless cultural interactions and exchanges that took place in the region–like coffee itself, and, in fact, like Starbucks. After all, it was Italian coffee culture, its espresso drinks and leisurely cafés on every corner, that inspired Schultz to create his own coffee behemoth.

Maybe someday the mermaid on the mosaic of Otranto will be face to face with her modern reincarnation on a glass-walled coffee shop on the other side of the church’s piazza.

At first glance, BoatHenge seems like nothing more than a bunch of boats stuck oddly into dry land; but, like most of America's great art installations created in a similar vein, it is only upon ruminating on the collective work itself that its true radiance begins to appear. 

Initially seen following the hundred years' flood of 1993, this series of painted boats in a lawn adjacent to the Katy Trail along the Missouri River is the work of anonymous artists. According to the official website, the circle of marooned crafts' origin story states BoatHenge either "sprouted from the earth or fell from the sky on the first day of spring." Built of the very things best suited to withstand waves, successive ravages of floods that have appeared since its arrival have done nothing to fell BoatHenge, and have instead only added to its mystical powers. 

Upon successfully relinquishing the obfuscated origins of BoatHenge to the realms of the unknowable, the site's nitty-gritty details reveal that the installation consists of six fiberglass boats bursting vertically from the ground while arranged in a semi-lunar formation. Precise mathematical measurements show that their height, width, and depth planted into the earth average to (gasp!) exactly match that of the original, ancient and mysterious Stonehenge located at Wiltshire, England. 

Adding a more American twist to the mystery are a series of apocryphal, tongue-in-cheek ties to famed explorers Lewis and Clark.  The site isn't easy to get to and can only be reached with a paddle (canoe), pedal (bicycle), or a lot of walking. Located at a spot called Plowboy Bend, the standing boats are all the more mysterious for their remote location. 

Now a free exploration museum that allows tourists to sit at its helm and haphazardly spin its knobs and dials, the U.S.S. Albacore was once the speediest sub in the sea, a Cold War vessel full of naval secrets.

The U.S.S. Albacore is currently beached on solid ground in Albacore Park, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and has been since 1985. Retired since 1972, the 200 foot submarine spent the better part of two decades acting as a research sub during the Cold War race for the perfect underwater warship. Along with experiments in sonar, radar, code-breaking, and a variety of coatings for the hull, even the hull itself was an experimental tear-drop shape made of high-strength steel. It was a study in hydrodynamics and a success in maximum speed. 

How fast could the Albacore go? The Navy isn't telling, but it was found that its blimp-like shape was so stealthy and sleek it could operate at the same maximum speed as its predecessor, but with half the horsepower. While some of her operations were publicized, much of what the sub could do was kept classified. After an eventful 20 years of exciting submarine action, she was decommissioned in 1872 after repeated diesel engine failures. Standing true to her proud motto, "Praenuntius Futuri' (Forerunner of the Future) the U.S.S. Albacore's trail runs shaped every submarine used in today's U.S. Navy roster. 

After being decommissioned, the Albacore was welcomed back to Portsmouth, the city that built her. Her 300 tons of steel were being transported to her awaiting display location when her portly girth got stuck in the mud of Portsmouth Harbor. Without the means to move her any further, the Albacore remained there, and the Albacore Park was brought to her.

Along with the free-range exploration of the inside of the sub with audio options to learn more about her (unclassified) adventures, the Albacore is surrounded by a memorial garden that serves as a tribute to the brave submariners who have lost their lives at sea.