This post is mostly actually to be found here: https://www.thereportingproject.org/wandering-licking-county-an-overdose-in-licking-county/
This is not technically in line with my attempts to post a running “draft” series of entries on the longer work Brad Lepper & I have been assembling about the Newark Holy Stones.
In this sequence, it is part 9, but we’re jumping ahead in the story (which hasn’t been entirely chronological anyhow), at least as I’ve tried to lay out our material thus far. We started with the circumstances of 1859 and early 1860, with the death of John Brown in December of 1859 setting the stage for the politics of 1860, which would see not two but four major party candidates for President of the United States by the end of June, and the looming threat of secession by the Southern slave-owning states.
And yes, even that reached back into 1857 and the Dred Scott Decision, a subject I will come back to shortly, and the Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858, in which many tend to forget: Lincoln lost. And in the coming national election in the fall of 1860, the top two national candidates will be again: Lincoln, and Douglas.
All of which I think is useful in understanding why someone would have fabricated, carefully if somewhat incompetently, objects with Hebrew inscriptions on them and plant them where the county’s leading field archaeologist would find them, as we argue starting with the unavoidably modern typeface Hebrew we see on the Keystone, found at the end of June in 1860; then the pattern of modern transposition errors in the Decalogue Stone, which turns up the first of November but whose discovery I haven’t actually described yet here. These two primary “Holy Stones,” both found in 1860, both found in Licking County, both found in active excavations long worked on over extended periods of time by David Wyrick, are inextricably tied to that remarkable and tragic figure.
Tragic for reasons of ailment and disability I’ve already addressed in earlier posts, and tragic because of his untimely death, which comes in April of 1864. The Civil War has focused national attention on other issues than the Newark Holy Stones, and for a variety of reasons, Wyrick is under great personal & financial pressure. He is trying to make a living with a tree nursery along the banks of the Licking River south of downtown Newark, and his debts are mounting. None of this would have helped his physical condition, which appears today to be rheumatoid arthritis, though we can’t know for sure.
Today, pain management is still a complicated subject, and carries with it all sorts of stigma and confusion around when and why people choose to relieve pain, how they do so, or even when they don’t. In the last two decades, opioid medications have become both a great blessing and a social burden, with debates still ongoing around what it means to have a prescription for an opiate-type medication, and also on the subject of harm reduction for those using opioids outside of the medical system.
So I wrote a piece in a series I am doing on history and our local context for The Reporting Project of Denison University. It arises out of my long-standing interest in the Newark Holy Stones, but it is also part of my ongoing attempt to understand what’s going on for David Wyrick, the both mysterious while also well-documented figure at the heart of this story. At a certain point recently, it hit me how contemporary some of these issues are, including what I argue is a pattern of misrepresentation about how David Wyrick died . . . while acknowledging we really do not know for sure much of anything about his last days. Because that’s also true about the mystery of so many overdose deaths right here in Licking County over the last ten years or so.
I hope you will click this link and read the full essay I wrote about “An overdose in Licking County.” This inquiry is part of our larger question: “Who made the Newark Holy Stones?”
Spoiler alert: we’re pretty sure it wasn’t David Wyrick. But in a sense, they had a hand in his death. At the very least, they sure didn’t help him any. And he would be accused after he no longer could defend himself of fabricating them, which I think doesn’t hold up any more than does the verdict of suicide.
Vince, the proof is in the typography. The shapes of the letters. Also, as we'll see on the Decalogue Stone, a pattern of errors in the letters that show it was copied from a modern Hebrew Bible. The example I keep coming back to is if you had a document, and the parchment was ancient, it was found in an archive in Philadelphia, and the wording sounded plausible for 1776 . . . but the letters are shaped like the font "Comic Sans" . . . at some point you stop trying to figure out how this amazing coincidence happened that a scribe started drawing letters exactly like a 2000 typeface, and you ask "why would someone create a document and insert it into this archive for someone to think it's old?" Because the lettering being in a format that's entirely modern isn't a coincidence. And you'll note most supporters of the Decalogue Stone will quickly concede the Keystone is a modern object; even Dr. Altman said it was probably something accidentally left by a Jewish tinker or trader recently. The problem is the Keystone and Decalogue Stone rise or fall together, and they most definitely fall -- as ancient artifacts -- but they're of interest because there was an honorable intention at work in 1860 that justified the amount of work they put into creating and hiding them.
Still waiting for some proof and not just allegations. "Allege" is a funny word to be aligned with "professionals." What do they go to school for?
"to assert or declare something without proof."
People pay these idiots to allege things?
Then when proof is given.. it's a hoax!