Great Americans: The Man Who Built America’s Stonehenge

Welcome back to Great Americans, a countdown to our country’s 250th birthday. We’re bringing you a writer we love on an American they love, every weekday between now and July 4. Previously, Philip K. Howard paid tribute to Mary Parker Follett, the social thinker who understood the secret of group behavior—and why American democracy keeps getting it wrong. Today, Josh Code remembers Harvey Fite, the visionary sculptor who spent nearly four decades building one of America’s greatest works of land art, alone. —The Editors

It looks like an alien creation, like something extraterrestrials would make after graduating from crop circles.

In a forest near Woodstock, New York, circular platforms wrought from bluestone wind into curving edifices, wrapping around stone staircases, crevasses, and some scant foliage across nearly seven acres that are altogether a work of art. Two pools of natural freshwater sit at the sculpture’s base, enveloped by winding walls of stone. At the center of it all, a nine-ton monolith juts into the sky.

America has its own Stonehenge, and one man built it—all alone.

It’s called Opus 40.

The experience of seeing Opus 40 is hard to describe, and no photograph can do it justice. You can be in it, on top of it, and around it. You can walk through its narrow passageways, where cool air flows through, up steps and down inclines. Like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty or the huge, contoured steel sculptures of Richard Serra, the artwork’s beauty lies in its simplicity, size, and harmony with the environment around it.

Fite in the late 1940s. (Courtesy Opus 40, photographer unknown)