ARTSCULTURE · HISTORICAL MARKER
Welcome to the Scripture Rocks Heritage Park
Arts & Culture
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Scripture Rocks Heritage Park near Port Barnett was dedicated in June 2016 by the Jefferson County History Center as a public access site on 4.5 acres of forested hillside containing the largest known rock art site in this country. It includes 64 sandstone boulders engraved by Douglas M. Stahlman circa 1910-1913 to express his perceptions of religion, aspects of his personal life, and his relationship to the community. The park contains Altar Rock, the largest boulder, which Stahlman turned into an open-air chapel for community worship and later built his cabin upon, where he wrote his journal. The site also includes a small prehistoric Native American rock shelter, evidence of mid-nineteenth-century quarrying, and a failed coal mine. Douglas Monroe Stahlman was born on August 17, 1861, near Kirkman in Warsaw Township, Jefferson County, Pennsylvania, the fifth of ten children. He attended Erie Commercial School, became a schoolteacher at Clear Creek School near Sigel, and also worked as a book agent. He married Marion Alsobrook in Dyer County, Tennessee, on November 4, 1897, and they moved to Valpariso, Indiana, where he attended the Northern Indiana Normal School. Their first son, Glen Davis, was born on September 26, 1898. In February 1901, he became involved in a nationally publicized scandal connected to John Alexander Dowie's religious faith-healing movement; applying those beliefs to his sick wife, he prevented her treatment by a physician, and she died from blood poisoning after the birth of their second son, James M. Stahlman was then incarcerated and declared insane, and during the trial his children were taken to his wife's family, beginning his lifelong effort to regain them. Early in 1907, he returned permanently to Brookville, soon began praying at what became Altar Rock, and started public outdoor sermons and rock dedications. In the fall of 1911, he began engraving the rocks while recording his thoughts in journals. His role in the community and his unusual behavior brought both support and disdain. Beginning in May 2009, members of the North Fork Chapter 29 of the Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology systematically searched for and recorded the rocks, using Stahlman's journals and local informants to document 151 inscribed rocks in eight separate groups around Brookville. The Port Barnett group is the most significant because it marks where he first developed the idea of dedicating rocks, contains the largest concentration of engravings, and includes both his first and last inscriptions. In 2011, a Keystone Preservation Grant from the Pennsylvania Historic and Museum Commission to the Jefferson County History Center funded formal mapping of the Port Barnett group and plans for a heritage park. In the fall of 2014, construction of the park began through cooperation of the landowners and support from grants and private donors, and additional rocks remain to be discovered.
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