last Newport post: cameras/semi-mysterious tower

Walk­ing around town when I get breaks between meet­ings I’ve dragged along one of two cam­eras. One is a trusty roll film cam­era that I’ve been using for years, and the other is this embar­rass­ment of a dig­i­tal cam­era, the first dig­i­tal cam­era I bought John when dig­i­tal cam­eras were just com­ing out. I haven’t gone shop­ping to Toys R’ Us lately but I’d guess that it has the same megapixel capac­ity as a My Lit­tle Pony dig­i­tal cam­era today, if they make such a thing. At least it’s not pink. Maybe I should say that it has 1,300 kilopixels–certianly lots more impres­sive than 1.3 megapix­els. And on top of the low res­o­lu­tion it eats bat­ter­ies like crazy. Seri­ously I thought it had died and gone to dig­i­tal cam­era pur­ga­tory until I dropped into the gift shop down­stairs and fed the cam­era five bucks in bat­ter­ies. Might have been a good excuse to finally get myself a real dig­i­tal camera.

Since most of the pic­tures I took were with the film cam­era I’ll have to forgo the imme­di­ate grat­i­fi­ca­tion and wait to see the pic­tures until I get them devel­oped. But here’s one of the ran­dom dig­i­tal shots of a struc­ture located just above the down­town tourist dis­trict. Though it’s called many things, it appears on the map I have as the Old Stone Mill, though it’s doubt­ful that it was ever attached to any oper­a­tion like a mill. In fact, it’s appar­ently a bit of a mys­tery what it is exactly, and a bit of a mys­tery who built it. Appar­ently car­bon dat­ing of the mor­tar dates it to var­i­ous dates, some as late as the late sev­en­teenth cen­tury, some to the early 1400s.

Old Mill Tower

Call me a skep­tic, but just like peo­ple who claim their hotel is haunted, what mys­tery there might be well could be overblown and might have noth­ing to do with real­ity, though it’d cer­tianly be good for busi­ness. There are a lots of web pages where it’s dis­cussed: wikipedia of course; Curt F. Waidmann’s nicely researched The New­port Tower: a Medieval Ruin in Amer­ica; the Red­wood Library and Athenaeum’s page on it; and the more scandal-/mystery-driven page on Unex­plainedEarth. If any of those pages have any author­ity, Wikipedia points to the Red­wood Library’s pages, and I might go with that eval­u­a­tion: The library is located just across the street.

February 23 2008 | Categories: photography • rambles | Tags: • • • • | 1 Comment »