The Inscribed Stone, sometimes called the 90-Foot Stone, is one of the most contested artifacts in the Oak Island documentary record. The Chester Municipal Heritage Society maintains a topical research compilation on the stone as part of its online research material.
The compilation documents the standard accounts of the stone's discovery, conventionally placed at the ninety-foot level of the Money Pit during the work of the Onslow Company in 1804, with the stone described as bearing carved symbols of unknown origin. It traces the stone's subsequent history through its association with members of the Pitblado, McCully, and Blair families across the nineteenth century, its transfer to A.O. Creighton's bookbinding shop in Halifax in the 1860s where it was reportedly used as a beating stone, and its disappearance from the documentary record after Creighton's bookbinding business closed in the early twentieth century.
The compilation gathers the various transcriptions of the stone's inscription that survive in the published record, the most widely cited of which is the version associated with the Reverend A.T. Kempton and rendered as a substitution cipher decoding to a brief English statement concerning the depth and value of buried treasure. The compilation notes that the Kempton transcription is itself contested, with no contemporary verification that it accurately represents the symbols originally carved on the stone.
Material includes period photographs and sketches of similar stones, contemporary newspaper accounts of the discovery and subsequent history, correspondence between the principal nineteenth-century witnesses, and assessments by later researchers including R.V. Harris, D'Arcy O'Connor, Doug Crowell, and Kel Hancock.
What this source documents
Account of the 1804 discovery of the Inscribed Stone at the ninety-foot level of the Money Pit during the Onslow Company excavation; the stone's subsequent history through Pitblado, McCully, Blair, and Creighton custody; its disappearance from the documentary record in the early twentieth century; the various surviving transcriptions of its inscription, including the Reverend A.T. Kempton transcription that became the standard cipher reference; assessments by later researchers including R.V. Harris, D'Arcy O'Connor, and the Blockhouse Investigations Compendium project.
Why it matters
The Inscribed Stone is one of the few artifacts that, if authentic and accurately transcribed, would establish that the Money Pit was constructed before 1795 and that its constructors intended to leave a message about its contents. The disappearance of the stone and the contested status of the surviving transcriptions therefore bear directly on the central evidentiary question of Oak Island. The CMHS compilation gathers the principal documents relevant to this question into a single reference.