Norumbega Tower: a bizarre monument to a nonexistent Viking settlement

February 25, 2025 Ian Lamont

Nine miles west of Boston, not far from our home, there is a remarkable monument celebrating history that never happened.

In New England, history is everywhere. Place names reflect Native and British influences. Streets may curve to match an old farm road or ancient highway such as Old Connecticut Path. Houses are old, some even dating to the Colonial era. Monuments and historical plaques can be found in every town square.

An old stone tower overlooking the Charles River in an area known as Norumbega may not attract much attention at first (see video below). But the inscription at its base reveals a fantastic tale: The area was once the site of a Viking city, established not long after Leif Erikson supposedly found the Charles River in the year 1000 C.E.!

According to the plaque, the Algonquian placename, Norumbega, was merely an “Indian utterance” derived from Norvega, a Viking term for Norway.

“Industries for 350 years,” the inscription concluded. “Masur-wood, fish, furs, agriculture. Latest Norse ship returned to Iceland in 1347.”

Revisionist history is not a new concept. But the builder of Norumbega Tower, a former Harvard chemistry professor named Eben Norton Horsford, took an interest in an ancient Viking saga to a whole new level.

Horsford had invented double-acting baking soda and was very rich. Beginning in the 1870s, he and other members of Boston’s high society became obsessed with the idea that the first Europeans to arrive in the Americas were not Italians in 1492 or Pilgrims in 1620, but rather a group of Viking explorers led by Leif Erikson.

It is true that Viking sagas had noted Erikson’s accidental discovery of a place called Vinland after leaving Iceland. There was also a mysterious rock covered with pictographs about 30 miles south of Boston:

Experts declared that the carved lines on Dighton Rock were Nordic runes describing the arrival of Erikson’s lieutenant, Thorfinn Karlsefni, and 151 companions, some 900 years prior.

Horsford was sure that Vinland and Norumbega were the same. He published a series of books and articles documenting his beliefs, further spreading the idea of a Viking colony in New England. A statue of Erikson was erected on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston in 1887. Horsford determined that Leif Erikson’s house was located in his own Cambridge neighborhood - and placed a plaque on the spot to mark his discovery.

As for the tower, a jumble of rocks overlooking a bend of the Charles River convinced Horsford he had found the remains of a Viking city:

“When I had eliminated every doubt of the locality that I could find, I drove with a friend through a region I had never visited, of a topography of which I knew nothing, nine miles away, directly to the remains of the fort.”

As genealogists, we are familiar with the seductive lure of family legends and tantalizing coincidences. In the digital age, it’s all too easy to declare that the legends are true by simply merging your tree with a someone else's, without doing the hard research to verify the facts. In essence, this is what Horsford did, publicly cementing his Viking fantasy in stone and metal.

What are the facts? Native Americans have lived in New England for millennia. Archaeologists have unearthed traces of their settlements, as well as evidence of the first British settlers from the Colonial period. No evidence of Viking settlements has ever been found in the Boston area. The closest known Viking settlement at L’anse aux Meadows located more than 500 miles away as the crow flies, on the northern tip of Newfoundland.

Yet the legend of Norumbega persisted for decades after Horsford’s death, and became part of the local zeitgeist. Growing up in the 1980s, my Boy Scout troop even had a Norumbega Council patch that included Viking imagery: