The Enigmatic Erratic

The Case of the Enigmatic Erratic (lower right)

It's funny but during my four years of college and all the trips since I've never seen the square stone stub, sticking up like a tombstone in the middle of the central quad. It's hard to read the script but says something like "DESIGNED BY T. KELLY 1806... NO ERECTED 1808". I wish I'd had a Miami historian handy to ask the purpose of the monument. It reminds me of Ireland's serendipitous findings of old ruins.

The beauty of a google search gives this entertaining 1903 account:



Leveraging that find, more can be found:

Three years later, in 1838, a small science laboratory, no larger than a classroom, was built for $1,250. It stood southwest of the Center Building, near the present Bishop Hall, being kept at that distance for fear of fire. This building "Old Egypt" as generations of students called it , finally burned in 1898. By 1838 there were the Center Building, with its west wing, two residence halls, and the science laboratory; these comprised the campus buildings throughout the five decades of Old Miami, until the college closed in 1873.

There was, however, one other structure, the remains of which persist on the campus now and occasion surprisingly little wonder. A hundred feet from the front door of Bishop Hall is a sandstone pier, three feet high and two feet square. A close look, which few have taken in the past half century, shows it scored with initials of students long gone from Miami and fading inscription:

Designed in 1834
and erected in 1838
by John Locke, M.D.

This is the remnant of the second astronomical observatory in the United States.

American astronomy began in 1830 when a scientist at Yale carried a five inch telescope to a college steeple and observed Halley's Comet before word of it came from observatories in Europe. The first observatory in the United States was built at Williams College in 1836, and the next effort came in Ohio. In 1836 John Locke, an ingenious professor in the Cincinnati College of Medicine, designed a stone pier for the mounting of a small transit telescope. This primitive observatory he sold to Miami before the year was over, and Professor Scott set it up on the treeless south campus. The old stone pier still shows on of the iron fastenings which supported the transit.

In the spring of 1838 a small frame house was built of the stone pier, but it didn't last. On winter nights when a student's fire was sinking that shed began to go. It was all gone by 1840, and the transit was moves into Old Egypt nearby. However, in Loomis' Practical Astronomy, published in 1855, the Miami Observatory is listed at Lat. 39 ¡30'N., Long. 84¡ 46' W.--along with the other observatories of the world.

Black dot = approximate area of find