Balance Rock, East Hartland

NEWSPAPER ARTICLE FROM 1917

The above illustration, made from a photograph, represents a balanced rock on the farm of Cowdrey Banning, in East Hartland, in the northern part of the State.  It stands on the very margin of a ledge of rock, but is no part of the ledge and never was.  It is nine feet high, measures thirty-six feet around the largest part and six feet around the base-or an average of two feet in diameter.  It consists of seven different kinds of stone.

The questions that naturally arise in the minds of those who see it are “where did this rock come from, and how it came here?”   So far as I know the first question never has been answered.   The second questions is easily answered, it was brought here by ice.

It may not be generally known that at one time ice covered the northern half, more or less, of North America.  This may have been a million, or several million years ago.  Nobody knows.  But the fact is indisputable.  This ice-cap, really a continent-wide glacier of immense thickness, slowly made its way downward till it reached a latitude where the heat was sufficient to melt it.  On its way it picked up fragments of rock of all sizes, together with soil and whatever else it found that was movable by its mighty force, and dropped these materials along its route as heat or friction released them from its grasp.  And at the end of the glacier there was usually a large accumulation of earth and stones, dropped from it as it melted.  This accumulation is called a “terminal moraine.”  Long Island seems to be such a moraine, as that was the limit of the eastern side of the glacier.  The stones on the underside of the ice scratched the surface of the masses of imbedded rocks in multitudes of places along its route and it its way the direction of the ice-movement is easily determined.

This balanced rock in East Hartland is not the only one, but it perhaps the most wonderful of all that have been discovered.

Right here I might speak of another rock in Putnam County, New York.  It is over fifty years since I saw it, but my recollection is that it is about the size of “lovers rock” at Compounce lake.  It is not a balanced rock, but rests, clear from the ground, upon three small boulders.  It was, no doubt, left there by the ice.

C.H. Riggs

Mr. Twining writes that when boys, he and C. Banning tried to move Balanced Rock with bars and that he had learned that generations before had tried powder behind it, but the rock still remains unmoved.  He also writes that near Denver, Colorado, in The Garden of the Gods there is a brother to this rock, although not of a granite combination.