What Happened to “America’s Stonehenge”?

Dec 24, 2023

By Charles Bethea

In 1981, the Elberton Granite Finishing Company published a fifty-page book about a "mysterious monument" that it had erected, a year earlier, in a cow pasture seven miles outside a small north Georgia town. Elberton bills itself as the "Granite Capital of the World," owing to a massive deposit of fine-grained bluish-gray rock beneath it, which is used in two-thirds of U.S. headstones. The book celebrated a much different undertaking. The company had spent the previous year quarrying, sawing, refining, engraving, and positioning six stones—standing nearly twenty feet tall and collectively weighing a quarter of a million pounds—in a Stonehenge-like configuration. It was meant to function, partly, as a solar calendar. Of greater interest, though, were ten guiding principles engraved on the stones, in eight languages, including Chinese, Sanskrit, and Swahili; they seemed to anticipate a post-apocalyptic future. The instructions ranged from the sensible ("Be not a cancer on earth—leave room for nature" and "Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts") to the eccentric, or even troubling ("Unite humanity with a living new language" and "Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature"). It was, by far, the town's most popular tourist attraction.

The idea for the Georgia Guidestones, as they came to be called, had not originated with anyone at the Elberton Granite Finishing Company—nor, it seemed, with any Georgian at all. They had been commissioned, down to the most exacting detail, by a nattily dressed middle-aged man who showed up in town one June day in 1979 and introduced himself to Joe Fendley, the president of the granite company, as Robert C. Christian. This turned out to be a pseudonym. Christian shared his real identity with just two known Elbertonians: Fendley and the president of the local bank, Wyatt Martin, who acted as Christian's escrow agent during the financing of the monument's laborious and costly construction. (Payments were never wired from the same location twice, Martin said.) Fendley died in 2005, and Martin, who exchanged letters with Christian for years after the creation of the guidestones, passed away last December. If either man ever told anyone else who Christian was, no such confidant has come forward. "All along," Martin told Wired, in 2009, "he said that who he was and where he came from had to be kept a secret. He said mysteries work that way. If you want to keep people interested, you can let them know only so much."

According to the granite company's book, which leans heavily on the testimony of Fendley and Martin, R. C. Christian claimed to represent a group of "loyal Americans who believed in God and country," and who had been planning the guidestones for more than twenty years. The mystery of this group's identity has since invited speculation of its own. Some have claimed that Christian belonged to a "Luciferian secret society," whereas others, pointing to his name, believed that he was a Rosicrucian mystic. At least one detail in the granite company's book compelled the Luciferian hypothesizers: the monument's engraver, a local man named Charlie Clamp, had heard "strange music and disjointed voices" while he etched more than four thousand characters into the stones over a period of weeks.

Recently, I met one of Clamp's sons, Mart, outside the family business, Clamp Sandblasting, in downtown Elberton. Mart is a third-generation commercial stone carver, who, like most people involved in the town's industry, generally works on funeral projects. (He is especially proud of the lettering work he did on Hank Aaron's mausoleum.) Walking into Mart's small shop, I came face to face with his current undertaking: a large headstone for his mother and father. As we each took a seat in his office, we spoke about his father, and I mentioned the story of Charlie Clamp hearing strange voices while working on the guidestones. "I asked him about that one time," Mart said. "He said he didn't know where that story came from. The only thing he ever heard was a bunch of men cussing because the thing was so difficult to work with." Mart scoffed at the notion that the monuments were satanic. "If they were," he said, "my dad would have had nothing to do with it." As for the monument's weirder messages, such as the proposed population limit, Clamp wasn't bothered by them. "It's just saying that in case the world comes to a grinding halt, and you’ve got to start over, here are guidelines you might want to go by," he said.

Neither Rosicrucian nor Luciferian, Mart Clamp has acted as a pro-bono custodian of the guidestones for the past twenty-five years. In his view, the monument "showed off the craftsmanship" of Elberton stoneworkers, "and it just happened to have on it one man's opinion." Chris Kubas, who has been the executive vice-president of the Elberton Granite Association for nearly a decade, shares Clamp's pragmatic view. He told me that he's never been particularly interested in R. C. Christian's real identity or philosophy. "He was just another person who wanted a monument built," Kubas said. "And he had the money to do it."

Many locals were indifferent to the monument; some early Internet chatter and magazine coverage helped alert tourists. Clamp guessed that, until recently, about forty people, on average, visited the guidestones every day, some of them from other countries. "I had three busloads of tourists from England one time," he told me. "Probably a hundred and twenty people standing around there saying they’d come to see ‘America's Stonehenge.’ " Clamp figures that visitors brought half a million dollars annually to the Elberton economy. "Probably more if they stayed the night," he added. Kubas told me, shrugging, "It became a bucket-list thing."

The guidestones attracted critics, too. Kubas told me that he received calls about the stones from people who "thought they were evil." (The Elberton Granite Association's phone number came up when you Googled "Georgia Guidestones.") The calls became more frequent in recent years, Kubas said, once warranting follow-up by law enforcement. A few months ago, a local pastor publicly demanded the monument's removal, claiming that it advocated abortion and genocide. Someone once tossed an epoxy adhesive on the stones, which, Clamp told me, "stained it really bad." This was an escalation from the semi-regular spray-painting of pentagrams and obscenities.

A more enterprising visitor once dislodged a small block from a high section of the monument that had been damaged during construction. It was missing for years, during which time security cameras were installed. "Then one night, at about two o’clock, the sheriff called me and said, ‘Hey, this guy says he's done worshipping this stone,’ " Clamp said. He had returned it. Clamp held on to the remnant. Several years later, he discovered that a newlywed couple had "put their married date" on a stone and placed it where the stolen one had been.

"This last time, though," Clamp went on, referring to an incident at the site earlier this summer, "there's nothing I could do about that."

Shortly after four in the morning, on July 6th, an explosion rocked the pasture. One of the monument's columns was destroyed and the capstone was cracked. The remaining columns were rendered unstable and removed that day by county officials. Security cameras at the site captured grainy images of a lone figure running up to the monument prior to the explosion, then running away. After the explosion, a silver car fled the scene. "We always thought somebody might try to put a chain around the guidestones and pull it down," Clamp told me. "But I never thought somebody might come in and blow the thing up."

No arrests have been made, and there's currently no person of interest in the case, according to Parks White, the district attorney for the Northern Judicial Circuit of Georgia. (The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is leading the inquiry.) "It's just remarkable that someone would go to this extreme to destroy a landmark," White said. "It wasn't a satanic marker—it was a novelty." He noted the proximity of neighboring homes. "They could have killed people."

Who would do such a thing? "A nut," Clamp said. "An absolute fruitcake." He mentioned "that gubernatorial lady," meaning Kandiss Taylor, a far-right candidate for governor who received about three per cent of the vote in the Republican primary in May. Taylor had tweeted, "Elect me Governor of Georgia, and I will bring the Satanic Regime to its knees— and DEMOLISH the Georgia Guidestones." "She's a dumbass," Clamp continued. "That shouldn't even be in your top five hundred things to do." Clamp didn't think that Taylor had exploded the guidestones herself, but speculated that she might have inspired someone else to do so. In early August, the district attorney found images on the Internet showing a young white couple standing in front of the guidestones with QAnon-themed clothing and signs. Their faces are covered by cutouts of John F. Kennedy, Jr., and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, in MAGA hats. One sign bears the message "WE R TAKING R COUNTRY BACK! SHEEP NO MORE!" Another, more saliently, reads, "INTO A THOUSAND PIECES!" White was still tracing the images, which appear to date back to at least 2019.

When I reached Kandiss Taylor, later, she offered a different theory. "I think that it was struck with lightning," she said, of the monument. "There's nothing that indicates that it was blown up." She explained that some folks in Elbert County had messaged her about lightning in the area on the morning of the explosion. The lightning was God's work, Taylor added. "That's when I tweeted, ‘God can do anything he wants to: he can strike down satanic guidestones.’ " I asked her about the security footage showing someone running from the monument just before the explosion. "It looks like it's computer-generated," she replied.

Nobody in Elberton offered up any credible suspects to me, though I did hear a hypothesis about who might have financed the stones’ initial construction. Massoud Besharat is an Iranian American, now in his seventies, who has long owned a local stone-cutting-tool manufacturing company, a quarry in the area, and art galleries in downtown Atlanta and in a small town in France. Besharat also knew Joe Fendley. When I reached him, I explained that I’d heard he might have financed the guidestones. Besharat laughed. "It's not true," he said. "I have lived in many small towns, and in small towns they have nothing else except spreading rumors. Sometimes I have helped to make those rumors. But none was concerning guidestones." He added, referring to their destruction, "We have lots of lunatics today in the United States, all these right-wing conspiracy people. In Elberton, anyone could have blown that up." Besharat disapproved of the danger posed by the explosion itself, but the result satisfied him. "When I heard, I said, ‘Thank God,’ because I thought it was totally nonsense."

A few locals told me that advertisements for bits of the guidestones have popped up on Facebook Marketplace, though I couldn't find any listings. The proprietor of a town pawn shop told me that he wouldn't carry any. "I don't think it's legal to sell that or even possess it at the moment," he said. At another pawn shop, a man in a "Let's Go Brandon" T-shirt told me that he wouldn't trust anyone bringing in such a rock, "unless it had guidestone lettering on it."

What remains of the monument is now in a secure and undisclosed location. The Elberton Granite Association's board voted to keep the fragments, Kubas told me, "because we were proud of them." The association hasn't decided what to do with the stones yet, but Kubas imagines displaying a portion of them somewhere "more secure than a hilltop field."

White, the D.A., told me that he's considered creating a GoFundMe to purchase the parcel of land where the guidestones sat, if the county will sell it to him. He wants to erect "a giant black granite monolith or obelisk" there, he said, "like in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ so we can have a new tourist attraction." He went on, chuckling, "It’ll have motion sensors, and the ‘2001’ theme song will play as people approach it." Kandiss Taylor told me that she’d like to see "the biggest cross that's in the country, right there in their spot, and use it for the glory of God and for life." Clamp, for his part, hopes that the guidestones will be rebuilt exactly as they were, albeit with better security. He’d be more than happy to engrave them himself, he added. I asked him what he might charge. After a few minutes of punching numbers into a calculator and consulting some files in a cabinet, he said, "It would probably push half a million once you included the stencilling costs."

Clamp is a practical man, but he is not immune to flights of fancy. He recalled a day, some six or seven years ago, when he was up on a ladder trying to clean the epoxy off the upper reaches of the monument. "I heard music starting to play," he recalled. "I kept hearing these, like, bagpipes playing. Immediately I thought, This is what dad was talking about." He went on, "I finally poked my head over, and a guy who plays weddings and funerals is in the middle there with his bagpipes. He was, like, ‘Hey, what's going on? I’m just tuning my bagpipes.’ He said it was good acoustics up there." ♦

An earlier version of this article misquoted an inscription on the Georgia Guidestones.