The Pompey stone
A carved stone dug up in upstate New York in 1820, read for seventy years as evidence that Europeans had reached the region by 1520. Two relatives of a local engineer had cut it and put it in the ground as a joke.
Why this verdict
Debunked by confession: in 1894 the engineer John Edson Sweet wrote to a Syracuse newspaper to say that his uncle and cousin had carved the stone and buried it in the field where it was found, 'just to see what would come of it'.
- Period
- Region
- Reading time
- Sources
01The claim
That a gneiss boulder inscribed with a tree, a serpent and the legend 'Leo De L on VI 1520', unearthed by a farmer near Pompey, New York, in 1820, marked the grave of a European — variously a Spanish explorer, a missionary, or a captive adopted into an Iroquois community — and therefore recorded a European presence in inland New York more than a century before the documented arrivals.
02Where it came from
Philo Cleveland turned the stone up while clearing meadow in the summer of 1820. It went first to a local blacksmith's shop, where visitors deepened the letters with nails and files, then to Manlius, then to the Albany Institute, and after 1872 to the New York State Museum. Interpretation began almost at once and continued for six decades: Henry Schoolcraft in 1847 tied it to a party separated from Ponce de León, Joshua Clark and Buckingham Smith read it as a Spanish grave marker, and in 1879 the state librarian Henry A. Homes gave the fullest defence, arguing before the Oneida Historical Society that if genuine the stone held the earliest evidence of Europeans in North America.
03What the record shows
✕ DEBUNKED — Investigated and refuted. Here is what actually happened.
The scholarly case was always circular: no find context was recorded, the inscription had been physically altered by souvenir-hunters within months of discovery, and every reading of the text — papal regnal year, a man named Leo, 'de Leon' — was a conjecture built on the letters as they stood after the blacksmith's shop had finished with them.
The antiquarian William M. Beauchamp went at it directly in 1894, arguing on the evidence of the carving and the local record that the stone was modern. Later that year John Edson Sweet published a letter in the Syracuse Journal naming the culprits: his uncle Cyrus Avery and Avery's nephew William Willard had carved and buried it. They had decided not to come forward once serious scholars took an interest — the ordinary trajectory of a hoax that outgrows its authors.
The physical record supports the confession rather than the artefact. In 1937 the state archaeologist Noah T. Clarke found that the inscription itself had been altered again while in institutional custody, the 1520 recut to read 1584. A stone whose text changes twice in a century is not a document of anything except its handlers.
04What it cost
The Pompey stone is now displayed as what it is, by the Pompey Historical Society, which is the honest disposition of a fake. Its interest is in the seventy-year gap: this was not a case of one credulous enthusiast but of the professional apparatus of American antiquarianism — state librarians, historical societies, published monographs — building an interpretive literature on an object nobody had tested. The same field would repeat the exercise with the Cardiff Giant nearly fifty years later, in the same corner of New York.