Historical Graffiti: Leif Erickson Was Here?

AS THE TWILIGHT faded one day last spring, a football prospect from Philadelphia was inspecting the green expanses of Soldiers Field. He almost tripped over a rock near the now-deflated bubble, and, as he cursed what seemed so out of place on a playing field, he found that the stone was a dedication marker commemorating a former Harvard great who seemed totally insignificant to the high school recruit at that moment. "One thing about this place," he said. "Every god damn thing has some guy's name scratched on it somewhere."

It's true. Cambridge barely seems to have enough walls, cornerstones or gates to support the inscriptions people passing through leave behind. Here four citizens were killed by British soldiers. There Washington took command of the Continental Army. Over in that church the organ pipes were melted down for bullets. History has left its graffiti throughout the town.

And as celebrities-yet-to-be retrace the footsteps of heroes and villains of the past, the traditions and the anecdotes pile up on each other. Take the strange case of Holmes House, which stood near the intersection of Cambridge St. and Mass Ave. In that one building, Benedict Arnold received his commission, Oliver Wendel Holmes was born, and the poem "Old Ironsides" was written. Any pattern is elusive.

The oddest marker of all can be found near the City Hospital on Mt. Auburn St., an inconspicuous tablet that reads: "ON THIS SPOT IN THE YEAR 1000 LEIF ERICKSON BUILT HIS HOUSE IN VINELAND." The stone was placed on the left bank of the Charles in the 1880s by Eben Norton Horsford, then Rumford Professor of History Emeritus. His painstaking research led him to believe that the Northmen were familiar with Boston Harbor and the Charles, and that Cambridge was Vineland itself.

He based his precise location on what seemed to be large stone walk-ways leading from the rivers, similar to those built by the Northmen in Iceland and Greenland. Those stones were pushed aside for highways in the 1940s and have never been dated. Perhaps this is a sinister plot to play with history perpetrated by a powerful Cambridge ethnic group, one that would rather celebrate Columbus Day.