In the late 1880s, America’s thoughts turned to preparations for the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s landing in 1492. Although Columbus did not make landfall on what would become mainland North America – landing instead on the Caribbean island he would christen Hispaniola – his name was synonymous with the arrival of Europeans in the western hemisphere. Cities and states around the country prepared to celebrate with events from parades, lectures and publications to the World’s Columbian Exposition, which took place in Chicago in 1893.
At the same time that these anniversary preparations took place, a Harvard professor proposed an alternative history of the first European presence in North America. Eben Norton Horsford, a chemistry professor who had made his fortune inventing a double-acting form of baking powder, used his considerable resources to advance his theory that Norse explorers under the leadership of Leif Erikson had sailed across the Atlantic in around the year 1000 C.E. and established a settlement in what became New England. Horsford argued that this mythical city, named Norumbega, served as the capital of the Vikings’ fledgling colony of Vinland.
Horsford was so convinced of his theory that he used his own money to build a stone tower (known as the Norumbega Tower) at what he believed was the site of a Viking fort at the intersection of Stony Brook and the Charles River in modern-day Weston. Horsford also paid for the installation of a granite marker at 330 Mount Auburn St. in West Cambridge, near Mount Auburn Hospital, to commemorate what he believed was the site of a house built by Leif Erikson.
Although Horsford’s theories did not get much popular support in his lifetime, they were a curiosity and led to a broader discussion of who “founded” America and what should be recognized as the country’s true heritage. Horsford died Jan. 1, 1893 – just before the opening that year of the Columbian Exposition – but his daughter Cornelia continued her father’s research into what the family believed were remnants of Norse settlements along the Charles River.
Horsford’s advancement of the Vinland theory reflects growing concerns among many Americans in the late 19th century about increasing and shifting immigration patterns; this was particularly true in the Boston and Cambridge area, which saw waves of arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Caribbean and Asia.
Italian-Americans, who had begun to arrive in earnest in the last quarter of the 19th century and who experienced discrimination and hostility in their new home, had seen the national celebration of Columbus in 1892 as a point of pride and a chance to uphold an Italian as a pillar of American heritage. In arguing that Leif Erikson and his Viking compatriots had predated Columbus by almost 500 years, Horsford made the claim for America as a country with Nordic origins. Horsford also put forward the idea that many of the place-names in and around Cambridge that had been ascribed to Indigenous languages were, in fact, derived from Norwegian terms, erasing the Massachusett people and their Indigenous neighbors from the very landscape they had inhabited for millennia.
Most Cantabrigians paid little attention to the Vinland theory, but its embrace by Horsford and his elite contemporaries illustrates the ongoing debate about the origins and national character of the United States, particularly at key points in the nation’s history. Although there was no solid historical or archaeological evidence for a Viking settlement along the Charles, the myth of Nordic origins held a strong appeal for those fearful of the shifting demographic face of Cambridge, and the story of Vinland gained renewed interest during the 1910s, ’20s and ’30s. Every few years during this period, the tale of Leif Erikson’s Cambridge landing and subsequent settlement would pop up in one of the local papers, with the reporter retelling the story and raising the possibility of contemporary scientists finding new evidence.
Although this evidence never materialized, the possibility of a Viking presence nearly a thousand years earlier echoed broader ideas about racial “purity” and the dominance of Anglo-Saxonism that was taking hold in Europe and would soon lead to the Second World War. By featuring Horsford’s theory during his lifetime and reiterating it periodically in the decades after his death, Cambridge newspapers gave voice to the fears of local elites and members of the dominant culture that their role in America’s heritage was under threat and must be protected and reinforced. Embracing the veracity of Horsford’s work allowed for an alternative historical narrative in which white, northern Europeans – not Italians or even Indigenous peoples – were the founders of what would become the United States.
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