Fireplace

A Fireplace That Tells the History of Man

(Originally published in The Royle Forum, March 15, 1950.
Reprinted with the permission of Lowell Thomas Jr.)

As a boy I lived high up in the Rocky Mountains at an altitude of some ten thousand feet, where the sun set behind the rugged Sangre de Christo Range and the stars shone like lanterns. Our town was a gold mining camp inside the rim of an extinct volcano. Rocks and their formation were a part of our daily conversation. Geology was real and practical there. We lived with the wonders of Nature.

Later, in Alaska, and then far distant lands—Arabia, Afghanistan, Australia and Africa, I saw and felt the wonders of Nature expressed in endless forms. But each adventure showed me something else—the wonders of Man and his desire to express himself in significant monuments. I beheld the civilization of each country portrayed in the buildings man has constructed—or the ruins thereof. Then it was that I began collecting stones from far off places, as reminders of what Man has done and can do. I knew that some day I would find a place for these stones.

Years later when my wife and I returned to America from our wanderings, we started remodeling an old farm house. Then it was that the idea of a fireplace made up of stones telling the History of Man came to me. It seemed the perfect idea. But my wife didn’t think so. She put her foot down and told me in no uncertain terms that there would be no such fireplace in our New England Colonial home! She wanted a home, not a museum. I even had to fix up a special room for all our mementoes. She wouldn’t have ‘em in the living room, the dining room and all over the house. And now I know how right she was.

It was not until years later when I remodeled an old Quaker Barn, transforming it into a Community Center for our Quaker Hill neighborhood, that the opportunity presented itself. Then it was that I built the fireplace of my dreams.

To begin with it was faced with 220 cement blocks, each a foot square. My plan was to remove a block whenever the right stone came for that particular spot. Then I sent out word to my friends in distant lands, from San Domingo to Samarkand, from Persia to Peru, from Ireland to India, telling them about the fireplace. One evening I told about it on the radio. By short wave I was heard all the way from Spitzbergen in the Arctic, to Palmer Land in the Antarctic. I told how on one side of the fireplace there were places for the works of prehistoric man. On the other side the lower rows were for the story of known man beginning six thousand years ago. Way up at the top I told how I was leaving one row for the fun of future generations.

After much consultation with men both wise and otherwise I selected a suitable inscription to go over the lintel of the fireplace. It is an ancient Sanskrit proverb—written in that language. Translated it reads: “One who lets his day pass by without practicing generosity or enjoying life’s pleasures—is like a blacksmith’s bellows—he breathes but does not live.”

The whole idea of the fireplace caught on, stirring the imagination of travelers in many lands. Letters came from various parts of the world telling of stones friends hoped to bring from some ancient ruin or from some forgotten city recently excavated.

The first piece to arrive was a fragment of limestone from the Palace of Sargon II (about 700 B.C.) at Kharsahad near Mosul. On the face of it are cuneiform characters, in Assyrian. This one is only loaned to us—for a thousand years!

Shortly after came a brick bearing the stamped inscription of King Ishme Dagon of Ur of the Chaldees. Ur is the oldest city in the world of which we have any definite historical knowledge. This brick has a place of honor in the very bottom row on the right hand side.

Next to it is a stone from Mount Ararat that my son brought home from one of his trips. It has just been placed in the fireplace. This stone came from the summit of the mountain from the spot where the Ark was supposed to have rested. My son says Noah bumped aground on this particular rock. At any rate no one has been able to prove that he didn’t!

A radio listener in Puerto Rico heard the story and sent a piece of marble from the Basilica of Saint Peter’s Cathedral in Rome. We still need a full sized block from the Pope.

Another came from the oldest Spanish building in North America—from St. Augustine, Florida, presented in person by the wife of the Mayor of that picturesque city.

On the third row left is a round stone from Zuni, one of The Seven Cities of Cibola, for which Coronado and his party were searching when they came north into our southwest. This was presented by the scholarly Dr. Herbert Spinden, then president of the Explorer’s Club and curator of the Brooklyn Museum.

Near it is a weird Mayan image brought back by that indefatigable traveler Robert L. “Believe-it-or-not” Ripley.

There is only one stone in the fireplace that is not connected with some monument of man. It was presented by former President Herbert Hoover, who said that he found it nearby on Quaker Hill. He assured us that it is part of the original crust of the earth, at least five hundred million years old. President Hoover said that in a fireplace depicting the history of civilization there should be at least one stone to represent our planet whereon Man has built all of his long succession of civilizations.

On the lower right is a group of stones from Ezion-Geber. Where is that? Well, Ezion-Geber was King Solomon’s seaport, at the head of the Gulf of Akaba, some 3000 years ago. I visited that site twenty-five years ago, when I was with T. E. Lawrence and the Arab Army of World War I. At that time it looked just like the rest of the desert wilderness. But Lawrence told me he thought there once was a city right where we stood. He predicted that some day archeologists would prove he was right. And that was what happened. A few years later an expedition led by Dr. Nelson Glueck, head of the American Oriental Institute of Jerusalem and Baghdad, uncovered Ezion-Geber. There are two black stones from one of the furnaces where Solomon smelted his ores. The large oval stone was part of one of his smelters. Here came the gold from King Solomon’s mines.

On the left a little higher up is a round tile-head from China. It came from the Emperor’s Palace built during the Han dynasty (about 200 B.C.) when China’s capital was at Sian, some four hundred miles west of Peking. This rare tile was brought in by Raymond Thornburg, who was then acting as an advisor to Marshal Yen Shi San. He is now publisher of Guideposts.

In the center, right above the lintel, is a large Buddha of uncertain age, a gift from Burton Holmes—from China.

Capt. Bob Bartlett, of North Pole fame, heard the story of the fireplace the night I mentioned it on the air. At the time Capt. “Bob” was on an expedition to Greenland. So he brought us a stone from the Peary Monument which stands 1,500 feet above sea level on the Summit of Cape York, looking out across the Polar Sea. The monument was erected to commemorate the Peary expedition to the North Pole.

My broadcast also had been heard way down near the South Pole, by Finn Ronne, one of the leaders of the second Byrd expedition. Finn Ronne prepared a stone from their most remote base in Palmer Land. It was boxed carefully and addressed to me. But Winter closed in so fast the explorers had to depart hurriedly, in a small plane, leaving almost everything behind. Several years later however, with his own expedition, Commander Ronne returned to that Antarctic base. The box was still there, and this time he brought it out, and we have the stone.

High up near the center of the fireplace is a tile from Jamestown, the first English settlement in Virginia; also a fragment from Plymouth Rock; and, a brick from old Williamsburg.

In a nearby square there is a stone from Mt. Vernon together with one from the block in front of the sub-Treasury Building on Wall Street where George Washington stood when he delivered his second inaugural address. We also have one from the Washington Monument.

In the next-to-the-top row are stones from the Gatun Lock of the Panama Canal, a piece from the Grand Coulee Dam, and another from the main bastion of the largest bridge in the world, the one that spans the Golden Gate. Al Smith presented a slab of marble from the Empire State Building, and Mr. Rockefeller one from Radio City. The last official act of Gutzon Borglum was to send us a piece of stone from the head of his Washington, on Mount Rushmore, in South Dakota.

The Irish government sent one from the Dominican Priory at Rosconimon, erected by O’Connor, King of Connaught, in the Thirteenth Century. There is one from the House of Parliament after it was bombed—that is, from the original Hall of Rufus which is a thousand years old. With it is a part of St. Paul’s Cathedral, from the dome which was hit by an aerial bomb during the London Blitz.

Commander Donald MacMillan sent one from the ruins of the home of Erik-the-Red, in Greenland. The same Erik who probably was the true discover of North America.

There are stones from Nineveh, Ephesus, Carthage, the Acropolis at Athens, the Forum in Rome, St. Sophia in Istanbul, the Holy Sepulchre, the Pyramids, from Borabadur in Java, and Angkor Wat in Cambodia. There are two stones from the Taj Mahal, “the most beautiful building on earth.” Former President Hoover even brought us a fragment from Hitler’s Reichchancellory.

Captain Irving Johnson, famed skipper of “The Yankee,” came back last year with a priceless figure of a man from far-off Easter Island.

My son and I have brought back many stones from our travels around the Globe. The latest is one from Lhasa, which we will install shortly.

How many spaces remain to be filled? Oh, about half. So if you are off on a jaunt and would like to send us a stone, just drop me a line and I’ll tell you what gaps there are in our History of Civilization fireplace.

Note from Electra Ward Nicks (1916 – 2003), secretary to Mr. Thomas for over fifty years:
The preceding article reflects the state of the fireplace at the time Mr. Thomas wrote the article in 1950. Since that time until his death in 1981, a number of additional stones were added to the fireplace, which in some cases caused existing stones to be relocated. More complete documentation on the fireplace is contained in a binder displayed near the fireplace.