Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

A Monument’s Mysteries Include Whether It Can Draw Tourists

The Georgia Guidestones in Elberton, which, according to local lore, were paid for by an anonymous man and offer instructions for life after a nuclear attack.Credit...Virginie Drujon-Kippelen for The New York Times

ELBERTON, Ga. — For more than 30 years, the hulking granite slabs inscribed with teachings in eight languages have raised profound and vexing issues: Why are they here? What do they mean? What do they say about life after Doomsday?

But confronted with a deep and sustained economic slowdown, residents here in the professed Granite Capital of the World are now pondering something a bit more mundane: Is there a way to turn a mysterious 237,746-pound monument known as the Georgia Guidestones into a moneymaker?

Only one man is said to know the identity of the benefactor who went by the name of R. C. Christian when he visited this East Georgia city in 1979 and paid for the display, supposedly on behalf of a group of others living outside Georgia.

“I made an oath to that man, and I can’t break that,” said Wyatt Martin, 82, the retired banker who helped broker the arrangement for the monument, which is 19 feet tall and resembles Stonehenge. “No one will ever know.”

But nearly everyone here has a theory about the artifact, built during the cold war and said to be, at least in part, a guide for civilization’s future in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Its edicts include a call to “unite humanity with a living new language” and a recommendation to keep the planet’s population below 500 million. (The Census Bureau estimates the world’s population is 7.1 billion.)

Image
A businessman is trying to raise the profile of the town through the Guidestones.Credit...VIrginie Drujon-Kippelen for The New York Times

“To some, it’s the holiest spot on earth,” said Hudson Cone, who has tracked the history of the Guidestones since he worked for the Elberton Granite Association, a trade group that some believe ordered the construction to draw attention to the city’s mainstay industry. “To others, it’s a monument to the devil. Take your pick.”

But if one man here gets his way, that lasting debate could become a spigot of cash for a county of nearly 20,000 people, where unemployment approaches 12 percent and the median household income stands below $33,000.

“My long-term goal is to build some sort of festival around it, something that would be a weeklong thing that could be held in two or three different spots around Elberton that could really draw in crowds and help the local economy,” said Mart Clamp, a local businessman who helped his father engrave the Guidestones. “There’s a big push right now for the wholesomeness of how small towns operate. People are drawn to that.”

Mr. Clamp, who has long volunteered to maintain the oft-defaced structure, urged county officials this month to lease him the land where the Guidestones stand so he can mount a campaign to attract more visitors to this area near the South Carolina border.

There are daunting legal obstacles to Mr. Clamp’s proposal. For starters, the property’s deed bars anyone from charging admission to the Guidestones and bans permanent buildings on the small, county-owned site.

But there is also early interest, partly because the Guidestones have long attracted visitors, despite the absence of an aggressive campaign to tempt tourists and Elberton’s significant distance from any interstate.

“It is the most-visited thing that we have in Elbert County,” said Tommy Lyon, the chairman of the County Commission. “We get people coming, so I assume that with the right kind of marketing, it could grow.”

Image
Wyatt Martin vows to keep the benefactor’s name a secret.Credit...VIrginie Drujon-Kippelen for The New York Times

But even if the Guidestones have proved tantalizing to outsiders, including many from abroad, there are still close-to-home skeptics like Sandy Beggs, an Elberton native who has never been to the site.

“I just have no desire,” Ms. Beggs said during her shift at her family’s Christian bookstore. “I’ve just always heard bad things.”

Others in the city cited anecdotes about episodes of witchcraft as their reasons for keeping their distance from Guidestones Road.

There is widespread curiosity about the donor — reportedly a tall, dapper man with a Midwestern accent who said he devised his pseudonym from his Christian faith. And there is also a consensus that the secrecy surrounding the monument has added to its allure.

“Whoever came up with this, whatever the reason, whether it was R. C. Christian or whoever, they did a heck of a job,” said Mike Reser, a South Carolina filmmaker who directed a recent documentary about the site. “If they come out and say R. C. Christian was definitely so-and-so, I don’t think anyone would visit the monument. Even if it came out to be someone kind of sensational, it would cause a stir at that time, and then it would die out, and I don’t think the stones would be visited often.”

But even if Mr. Christian’s identity becomes public, Mr. Clamp said he wants the stones to remain in place, untouched, a local monument, even if one that has not changed the world.

“It hasn’t really done anything,” he said. “The earth still turns, and Jimmy Hoffa isn’t buried here.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: A Monument’s Mysteries Include Whether It Can Draw Tourists. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT