54—Country Living/May 2008

Story and photos by CRAIG SPRINGER

Only “quirky” can describe this stone edifice. It’san ancient obelisk with a hollowed-out sphere

on top, carrying a patina of time the color of a wetmule. It is a tombstone — a monument to a manwho owned a fertile mind and his mission to provehimself right — that planet Earth was hollow.But it also is a tribute to American science, liter-ature and geographic exploration.

Below this obelisk lies the body of CaptainJohn Cleves Symmes in a park in Hamilton. Thepark was once a pioneer graveyard, a squarecity block set aside for that purpose by surveyorIsrael Ludlow, who laid outthe original town ofHamilton. Ludlow parsedwhat then was wildernessinto square-mile plots forits owner, Judge JohnCleves Symmes. This largeexpanse of land — whichstretched from Cincinnatibetween the Little Miamiand Great Miami rivers,north to about Monroe —was known as SymmesPurchase.

The park is ringed bytwo-foot-tall obeliskscapped with spheres. Thehollow sphere atop eachobelisk represents planetEarth ringed with the lati-tudes. Their open endsrepresent Symmes’s open-minded belief that ourplanet was hollow at thepoles, north and south.

Symmes was not a manof science in that he hadno formal academic train-ing. He was a soldier ofsome distinction, an officerin the War of 1812. Heleft the army in 1816 andbecame an agent for theFox Indians, stationed inSt. Louis. It was there in1818 that he self-pub-lished a circular anddeclared: “To all theworld! I declare the earthis hollow and habitable

within; containing a number of solid concentrick(sic) spheres, one within the other, and that it isopen at the poles 12 or 16 degrees; I pledge my lifein support of this truth, and am ready to explore thehollow, if the world will support and aid me in theundertaking. Jno. Cleves Symmes of Ohio, Late

Captain of Infantry.”Symmes sent 500 of these

circulars to scientific institu-tions, politicians, foreigngovernments and thethinkers of the day — allpotential patrons — through-out the United States andEurope. Symmes soughtfinancial support to explorethe yet unknown polarregions. The circular and hisideas received wide publicityand were met mostly withridicule, but not entirely byeveryone.

Symmes put forward thatour globe was comprised of shells stackedupon each other like an onion. He reasonedthat Earth’s center was an empty spacepulled as it were from its rotation. As evi-dence, he cited Saturn’s rings, claiming thatthey were the remnants of outer cores pulledto the center as they now exist — the remain-der had fallen back to Saturn’s surface. Closerto home, Symmes believed that theAppalachian Mountains were a remnant ofan older outer concentric ring.

The thought that the Earth is hollow wasn’tnew. The idea existed in Native Americanmythology, and early European scientists rea-soned similarly. Ben Franklin theorized thatour planet’s core was condensed gas, an ideathat persisted well into the last century.

Symmes left St. Louis to make a home inthe Hamilton area in the early 1820s. Fromthere he toured the East giving lectures, seek-ing financial support for polar expeditions.With him was a much younger man, a formerWilmington newspaper editor and OhioUniversity graduate, Jeremiah Reynolds.

Another patron opened many doors forSymmes — Samuel Mitchill of New York, whogave credence to Symmes’s wild speculativetheories. Mitchill was a consummate man ofscience, a medical doctor, the founding editorof America’s first medical journal, a professor

The “Hollow Earth” theoryA unique park in Hamilton memorializes

a crackpot conjecture of yesteryear

This monument in Ludlow Park inHamilton is the gravesite of JohnCleves Symmes, who believed theEarth was hollow, and that theinterior could be explored and eveninhabited through holes at theNorth and South poles.

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of natural sciences at Columbia, an ichthyologist anda United States senator. Mitchill wrote letters ofintroduction for Symmes to many scientists, particu-larly in New England. Through Mitchill, Symmesgained access to academicians who otherwise wouldprobably not have given the time of day to a provin-cial from the Western frontier.

It shouldn’t seem at all odd that Mitchill wouldtake interest in exploring the unknown. Mitchillshared with the young America a national eagernessto know more about the unknown. Witness the thenrecent explorations made by Zebulon Pike in theSouthwest, and Lewis and Clark to the Northwest.All three expedition leaders coincidentally hadserved at Fort Hamilton, a short walk from whereSymmes rests.

Symmes found another prominent patron closer tohome who would carry the “Symmes Hole” theorybeyond its originator. Symmes himself neverauthored a book on his subject. But James McBridedid. He was an ardent convert of Symmes’s ideas.

McBride was beyond the ordinary himself, but aman well inside the mainstream. He was the firstmayor of Hamilton, Butler County’s first sheriff,president of the board of trustees of MiamiUniversity, an archeologist and historian, and com-missioner of the Miami and Erie Canal. McBridepulled together Symmes’s ideas in the tome pub-lished in Cincinnati in 1826 with the long-windedtitle “Symmes Theory of Concentric Spheres, demon-strating that the earth is hollow, habitable withinand widely open about the poles, by A Citizen of theUnited States.”

Symmes and his followers roused Congress andOhio’s General Assembly to fund expeditions to thepolar regions, even suggesting doing so would opentrade with the inhabitants there. Symmes passed onan offer to attend a polar expedition by CountRomanoff, Chancellor of Russia. Otherwise, duringhis lifetime Symmes failed to attract wealthy influ-ential people to his cause.

After his death, Reynolds carried on the causeand succeeded. He pleaded to Congress and gar-nered the support of President John Quincy Adams.A national expedition to the South Pole was set. Butstates-rights southerners squashed the expedition,believing that such expeditions were better madethrough private endeavors. So Reynolds did such,reaching the Antarctic, but a mutiny put him on theChilean shore. Reynolds chronicled his experiences,one of which was titled “Mocha Dick,” the story of awhale sinking a ship, that later served as inspirationto Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

Through the seeds sown by Symmes, McBride’sbook, and Reynolds’ persistence, the U.S. govern-ment eventually sponsored the four-year-longWilkes Expedition to the south seas of the Pacific in1838. The expedition collected massive amounts ofmaterial. Cincinnati publisher and Arctic explorerCharles Hall embarked with a grant from Congress

on the Polaris Expedition in 1871, announcing thathe intended to find “Symmes Hole.”

Symmes’s theory intersected with another whollyAmerican experience, the creation of the Latter DaySaints. Its founder, Joseph Smith, may have heardSymmes lecture in New England, or read about thetheory in the 1820s and ’30s as this new faithformed. Faithful Mormons concern themselves withthe 10 lost tribes of Israel, and Mormon writingsrelate to their existence over the ice caps in the inte-rior. In popular culture, Symmes’s theory fed the fer-tile minds of prominent writers like Burroughs, Poe,Thoreau and Verne.

Today, there are no shortage of pseudo-scientistswho own an outward appearance of scientific legiti-macy. The critical review of their claims by scien-tists shows how authority can reveal baselessclaims, as was done with Symmes. Symmes’s criticsin his time noted that he seemed deftly able todeflect any decisive scientific review — Symmesjust countered ridicule with more circulars and morenewspaper stories and more lectures. Driven, hewas. It’s a paradox: the man memorialized for hispseudo-science had great consequence in the futureof publicly funded exploration by Americans, aroundthe world and into space. For that, the obeliskseems too small. ❏

Butler County native, Craig Springer, writes fromEdgewood, New Mexico.

The park is ringed withtwo-foot-tall obeliskscapped with spheres thatrepresent the Earth.

Country Living/May 2008—55

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