Myths and Legends of Our Own Land/Volume 2/The Old Stone Mill
THE OLD STONE MILL
IF the round tower at Newport was not Benedict Arnold's wind-mill, and any one or two of several other things, it is probably a relic of the occupancy of this country by Thorhall and his Norsemen. After coasting Wonderstrands (Cape Cod), in the year 1007, they built a town that is known to historians—if not in their histories—as Norombega, the lost city of New England. It is now fancied that the city stood at the mouth of Stony Brook, in Waltham, Maine, where a monument may be erected, but it is also believed that they reached the neighborhood of Newport, Rhode Island. After this tower—popularly called the old stone mill-was built, a seer among the Narragansetts had a vision in which he foresaw that when the last remnant of the structure had fallen, and not one stone had been left on another, the Indian race would vanish from this continent. The work of its extermination seems, indeed, to have begun with the possession of the coast by white men, and the fate of the aborigines is easily read.