Hibernia

That’s the question currently inflaming the intelligentsia of Putnam County, a rocky chunk of exurbia some 60 miles north of New York City, Its 247 square miles are home to 88,971 inhabitants and some 200 mysterious stone chambers that were built either 150 or 3,000 years ago, depending on who you talk to.

Some of the best examples are in the woods off Whangtown Hollow Road in this little community. And one of the best-preserved chambers is on the property of longtime resident John Murray.

Partially covered by an earthen mound, the chamber is about 5-foot-8-inches high, 6 feet wide and 15 feet long. Whoever built it made good use of local materials. Small rocks are stacked in the carefully balanced arch of a corbeled vault, three enormous shingled slabs fonn the roof and a couple more serve as the doorway and lintel. The temperature in the chamber feels a good 10 degrees cooler than outside and the stones drip with moisture. Mr. Murray refers to the structure as “Dave Kent’s root cellar,” referring lo a member of one of the town’s leading families. 

Members of the Kent Conservation Advisory Commission and the Kent Historical Society, however, revere it as a Celtic cathedral.

Charlie Boyle, whose business card proclaims him an expert in water dowsing and megalithic research, is in the latter camp, one of the group that ardently supports the theory that America was originally colonized by Celtic explorers who sailed their coracles across the Atlantic in 1500 B.C. By local legend, the explorers then came up the Hudson River to mine the iron deposits in what is now Putnam County.

Believers in the Bronze Age settlement hypothesis quote Barry Fell, professor emeritus of biology at Harvard and the author of Bronze Age America and America B.C.: Ancient Seniers in the New World. Mr. Fell contends that the stone chambers, menhirs and dolmens are druidic calendrical devices used to worship the sun. Proof of this, he claims, is that many of the chambers face either east or southeast, line up with the sun at the solstices, and contain stones inscribed in Punic and Iberian scripts and Ogam, the script of the ancient Irish.

Mr. Boyle can read Ogam and is able to spot inscriptions that might elude the untrained eye. At a meeting of the Kent Historical Society held at Penny Krupman’s house on Kentwood Drive of Whangtown Hollow Road, he holds up a rock that he stumbled across and speedily translates some scratches into an enthusiastic, if garbled, proclamation from a sun god. “This rock is loaded with thought forms,” he says, “I call these megalithic computer chips.” “That’s interest-ing,” ventures Mrs. Krupman, “You bet your life it is,” Mr. Boyle responds.

James Baker, another resident whose property boasts a couple of stone chambers, is of two minds on the question of their origin. He relates how a Fell disciple came to inspect the caves on Mr. Baer’s property and found some markings on a stone wall that he deciphered as the Ogam for Baal, or Bel, the sun god. But Mr. Baker, a retired high school history teacher, admits that he could just as casily see the markings as an incidental glacial scratch.

Adding his own ingredient to the brew, Mr. Baker believes that the stone chambers were simply colonial precursors of silos and that Dave Kent’s root cellar was, in fact, built by one Moses Mead, a highway commissioner in the first half of the 19th century who owned a large team of oxen and needed some place to store their winter feed.

Further debunking the believers, Mr. Baker explains that the eastern and southeastern orientation of the structures is a function of agricultural necessity: “You do most of the work in the early morning, so you’d want the light. And you’d place the opening of the cellar away from the north so that the roots wouldn’t freeze. The fact that some face sunrise at the winter solstice,” Mr. Baker inexorably continues, “is purely chance.”

But try telling that to Martin Brech. A retired philosophy professor, he thinks that the large chambers were used for religious rituals and the smaller ones for meditation. In fact, he has meditated in the chambers and he’s convinced that they’re something special. 

Mr. Brech camped out in the Celtic cathedral on the night before winter solstice and had such a powerful experience that he wrote a two-page, single-spaced poem about it. (“… nestled below mounded soft-bellied earth/proudly presenting the mother goddess Womb…”).

At dawn the next day, Mr. Brech gathered a group of people, including Mr. Baker for a sunrise solstice service.

They sang the Shaker hymn “Tis the Gift to Be Simple” and  the rock anthem. “We are the World” among other songs.

They also chanted the Supreme Mantha from the Heart Sutra of Buddhism as well as American Indian incantations. One of the participants, a follower of Wicca, the religion of witch-craft, brought a drum.

“He was very helpful,” Mr. Brech recalled. “He knew some of the same chants. “Everyone shared hot cider with a little rum and then, in an informal ritual, put food in each other’s mouths: trail mix.

That kind of stuff just makes Ella Townsend snort. “Oh, yes, says the 83-year-old Kent resident, “and then the drum roll comes in. “Farmart Mills Road, the main Kent thoroughfare, was dirt when her family moved in in 1921, and young Ella used to run errands for her father on horseback. Often when she made her deliveries, farm wives would proudly show her their stone root cellars stocked with turnips, potatoes, carrots and even preserved fruits and vegetables. 

“Putnam County is very rocky, so you couldn’t dig foundations for a basement,” explains Mrs. Townsend. Stone structures, carefully insulated from the cold and damp by a thick blanket of dirt and sod, did the trick instead.

A longtime member of the Kent Historical Society, Mrs. Townsend was present the evening when two professors came and gave a knowledgeable talk about these cellars being used for religious services. Everybody swallowed it and Bobbie [her friend, Barbara Adams] and I just sat there nudging each other.

Now that the weather’s more enticing, the woods around Putnam County are hopping with visitors less skeptical than Mrs. Townsend and Mrs. Adams. Mr. Brech leads tours for the curious, on behalf of the Kent Conservation Advisory Commission. He claims to have attracted as many as 50 people at a shot.

Enrique Noguera, who lives across the Hudson River in Kingston, is also in the guiding biz. He spends a lot of time in Putnam County on behalf of the Early Sites Preservation Association, of which he is executive director. Mr. Noguera leads tours of the cellars as often as twice a month and charges $25 per person (there’s a discount for groups of six or more.

Mr. Brech refuses to accept money, he finds the notion “subtly corrupting.”

What everyone agrees on, however, is that regardless of their origin, the stone structures need to be preserved. The threat is real. These days, it’s a lot easier to reach Dave Kent’s root cellar (or Celtic cathedral, as the case may be), thanks to a road bulldozed in by Ginsberg’s Development Corp. “Samuel Ginsberg promised that he wouldn’t destroy the site,” says Mr. Brech. “Yet he is going to have cluster zoning there.” Not if the Kent Conservation Advisory Commission, The Tree Commission, PLAN Kent (Protecting Land and Nature in Kent) and the Save Our Lakes political party have anything to do with it. Rallying around the root cellars, they invoke history, sanctity and what Mr. Baker calls “the mystery of the woods.”

Perhaps they—with a little help from the recession—are having an effect. Mr. Ginsberg’s development plans have been halted for the time being. And a real estate agent recently showing some property on nearby White Pond emphasized the dilapidated one chamber as a selling point.

 

The first comprehensive showing ever of the works of William M. Harnett (1848-1892) leader of the late 19th-century American school of trompe-l’oeil painting will open to the public at New York Metropolitan Museum of Art on March 14, 1992. 

His highly illusionistic paintings of books, musical instruments, and other everyday objects, engage the viewer by challenging cherished notions of reality. 

The Harnett presentation will remain at the Metropolitan until June 14, 1991, after which it will travel to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. 

Michael S. Egan, the Irish American Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Alamo Rent A Car, sponsors the exhibition, said, “It is our hope that as these exhibitions travel throughout the country, many people will develop a greater appreciation for the rich and diverse tradition of American painting.” 

A visual narrative of the tragedy of the Irish “Famine”, 1845-49, with paintings by Anne Therese Dillen, will be held at Iona College, New Rochelle, New York, from February 2-13. 

Dillen’s work stems from visits that she made to different burial sites and mass famine graves in Ireland two summers ago. 

Don Mullan, president of the Great “Famine” Project, who initiated Dillen’s visit to Ireland, said that “her sensitivity to the subject is extremely moving.”

Dillen also credited the reading of Paddy’s Lament, Thomas Gallagher’s book on the great hunger, with deepening her commitment. 

The exhibition includes 31 famine paintings and 10 more of modern Ireland.

In celebration of the University of Chicago’s centennial, the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art has organized Imagining an Irish Past: The Celtic Revival 1840-1940 to be on view from February 5 through June 16. The nearly 300 works of art, many from the National Museum of Ireland and the Ulster Museum in Belfast, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago, includes metal-work, ceramics, jewelry, textiles, stained glass, architectural ornaments, and illustrated books associated with the Celtic Revival in Ireland, England, Scotland, and the United States.

At the center of the exhibition is a group of objects, including reliquaries, croziers, book shrines and ornaments by Edmond Johnson, the Dublin goldsmith who produced replicas of jeweled metal work masterpieces of Irish art to the exact dimensions of the originals, which were then exhibited at the 1893 World’s Exposition in Chicago.

Throughout the run of the exhibition, the Smart Muscum will present programs that will highlight the music, theater, and literature of Ireland, including a performance of Lady Gregory’s Spreading the News by the Irish American theater group Erin Go Bragh and a lecture on “The Legacy of Chicago’s Irish Parishes,” by Ellen Skerrett.