Possible Shrine at Stockbridge, Vermont

Norman Muller

In April 2003, Ernie Clifford, my main contact in Vermont, showed me a fascinating stone mound site on a high plateau in Stockbridge, Vermont, at an altitude of about 2000 feet.  He had heard about the site from a hunter friend of his.  Over the following eleven years, I visited the site about five times, each visit teaching me more about the site.

The most impressive feature was a large stone mound with a large quartz cobble inserted into one face.  This mound was situated on a small knoll.

Several more trips to this site later, on a beautiful fall day, a friend and I headed west, downhill from the stone mound with the quartz, and found a interesting looking terrace formation on a knoll overlooking a small valley,  It may have measured at most about fifteen feet long.

This time, we looked at it from below, and didn't notice its connection with a large, vertically faced outcrop near where we stood when taking the photo.  In 2010 we revisited the site on a crisp fall day and decided to climb to the stone terrace just to have a closer look at it.  From the top we could look down  on the large outcrop below, which is visible to the left through the trees in the foreground.

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But what was even more amazing were possibly two recumbent standing stones on top of the terrace, the largest one in the foreground being a good meter long.

The terrace overlooked an impressive outcrop, one that Jack Steinbring, a rock art expert in Wisconsin has termed a "phenomenal attribute," meaning one that has presence. Undoubtedly the standing stone or stones, plus the terrace itself, were situated because of their proximity to the outcrop, which held particular significance to the aboriginal builders at this site.