The Grave Creek stone

In 1838 A. B. Tomlinson dug into the big mound he owned at Grave Creek, West Virginia, and said he found a small oval stone inscribed with alphabetic characters.

Charles Fort tells in The Book of the Damned how A. B. Tomlinson, who owned the large mound at Grave Creek, West Virginia, dug it open in 1838. Tomlinson said that, with witnesses present, he found a small, flat, oval stone disk engraved with letters of an alphabet.

Wikipedia's article on the Grave Creek stone describes the same object as a small flat stone bearing an inscription in unknown characters. It names Schoolcraft as the first to study the stone critically. When he saw it, five years after the find, it was lying unguarded among broken stone tools and old pottery. Wikipedia takes this to mean its finders had not realised it might matter.

e-WV, the West Virginia Humanities Council's encyclopedia, points to Dr. Clemens (1795-1846), a leading Wheeling physician who, it says, borrowed $2,600 to pay for the dig, expecting treasure and a profitable tourist draw. It says he had the books, the tools and the skill to engrave the stone. It adds that the characters look as if they were taken from a book on Spanish coins published in 1752. A 2016 article in Weelunk reports that experts by then mostly agreed the stone was a hoax. By Weelunk's account, those who still credit it to an ancient people disagree about its meaning, its author and its date; the guesses run from a Viking Christmas greeting to a message from aliens.