Have you ever wondered why Santa Claus lives at the North Pole, of all places? The answer might reside in a small urban park that was once a graveyard in Hamilton, Ohio. You will find there the Hollow Earth Monument, perhaps the most unusual tombstone ever raised in the United States. It is certainly among the very few memorials erected to celebrate an amazingly crackpot geographical theory.
Digitized by Internet Archive
Hamilton’s Hollow Earth Monument marks the gravesite of Captain John Cleves Symmes. He believed that the earth was hollow and that we could gain entrance to the interior of our planet through huge holes that pierced the North and South Pole. Symmes believed the climate at the poles was balmy and temperate, once travelers got beyond a protective ring of ice and snow—an ideal hiding place for Santa Claus.
Photograph by Greg Hand
Symmes announced his Hollow Earth theory in 1818 through a widely distributed circular. His theory inspired a generation of explorers to attempt (and uniformly fail) to find a route to the North Pole. All this expeditionary activity, plus Clement Moore’s decision to have Santa Claus’ flying sleigh drawn by reindeer, an Arctic animal, certainly inspired artist Thomas Nast to place Santa Claus at the North Pole in a cartoon published 29 December 1866 in Harper’s Weekly magazine. Harper’s was a widely circulated and hugely influential publication at the time.
If Symmes’ name sounds familiar it’s because he is the nephew and namesake of the same John Cleves Symmes who helped create Cincinnati. The younger Symmes earned fame as a hero during the War of 1812, and spent the rest of his life, and his reputation, propounding his crackpot theory.
From “The Symmes Theory Of Concentric Spheres,” page 68 Digitized by Hathi Trust
Symmes developed his Hollow Earth theory while living in Newport, Kentucky and sent pamphlets to every potential donor in the United States and Europe. He hoped to gather enough money to mount an expedition to the North Pole. United States President John Quincy Adams was reportedly on the verge of awarding federal funding to the Symmes expedition when he was voted out of office. Symmes died with his vision unfulfilled.
Symmes’ son, Americus Vespucci Symmes, took up the torch and published a book to popularize his late father’s Hollow Earth ideas. Americus claimed an 1871 expedition led by Cincinnatian Charles Francis Hall had verified his father’s theories, even though that voyage was turned back far short of the North Pole. Another Cincinnatian, John Uri Lloyd, was inspired to write an early fantasy novel titled Editorhpa (that’s “Aphrodite” spelled backwards) based in part on the Hollow Earth theory. Symmes’ theory also inspired Jules Verne to compose his novel, “A Journey To The Center Of The Earth.”
Alas, Americus, too, died before anyone travelled far enough north, or south, to prove or disprove John Cleves Symmes’ theory. Americus erected the Hollow Earth Monument over his father’s grave in 1840, and it has attracted curious visitors ever since.
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