Did Leif Erikson once live in Cambridge, Massachusetts?

The Tower at Norumbega

The desire to find a Viking origin for parts of the USA or to prove the presence of the Vikings in the USA is strong. It shows in the enthusiasm with which the Kensington Runestone and other similar runestones were received. The following items are examples of the misconceptions that result from knowing the answer before the evidence has been examined.

Eben Horsford, an early food chemist, claimed that Leif Eiriksson had made his home in Massachusetts. He claimed to have found Norse artefacts in Cambridge MA that proved this. He built a tower nearby to mark the site where he thought a Norse city and fort had existed.

The Newport Tower

Public domain

The Newport Tower is probably a 17th- or 18th-century windmill. Nevertheless, that did not stop Carl Christian Rafn from declaring that it was evidence of Viking activity in Rhode Island. As a result of this, Longfellow incorporated this idea into his poem 'The Skeleton in Armour'. The archaeologist Philip Ainsworth Means examined the tower and declared it to be Norse too. His evidence has been shown to be wrong since then. Despite this, the idea that it is Norse caught the imagination and the tower features in films such as 1928's The Viking where it is declared to be a symbol of peace between Native Americans and the Norse settlers.