Carhenge: Nebraska’s Stonehenge
Stonehenge is an enigma. Built some 4,000 years ago, the famed structure on England’s Salisbury Plain has yet to be comprehensively explained. Exactly how a nomadic population managed to transport dozens of 30- and 40-ton stones and painstakingly fashion them into an elevated ring will likely remain a mystery forever. Carhenge, on the other hand, is not quite so baffling. A replica of Stonehenge in terms of size and orientation, it took shape on the western Nebraska plains 15 years ago, with junked American cars in place of the slabs of stone. Building Carhenge, according to creator Jim Reinders, was “something to do at our family reunion.”
Reinders was born in Alliance, Nebraska in 1927, and later trotted the globe as an electrical engineer. Stonehenge captured his imagination when he called London home in the 1970s.
In 1982, Reinders’ father passed away. When his family came together in Alliance for the funeral, they began planning a reunion. “We decided to do something a little different together in five years,” recalls Reinders. “I proposed my idea [Carhenge] and everybody grabbed onto it.”
Just like clockwork, the Reinders clan again descended on the family farm just north of Alliance during the summer of 1987. The construction schedule involved seven eight-hour days of work. Notes Reinders: “We tried to get started early in the morning, but the beer drinking got a little heavy in the afternoon, so we usually knocked off a little early.”
With the help of a backhoe and a forklift, Reinders and a dozen relatives positioned 38 cars in accordance with Stonehenge’s modern appearance – as opposed to what it looked like in 2000 B.C. The autos – which include several classic Cadillacs, an AMC Gremlin, and a Willys pickup – were uniformly painted battleship gray.
Carhenge began generating a buzz before the paint dried. The Nebraska Department of Roads declared it a junkyard and demanded the area be fenced. Then the city of Alliance termed it as non-agricultural usage of agricultural land, a zoning violation.
The controversy cooled quickly. “The city became much warmer to the idea when people started showing up,” says Reinders. In 1989, the city council officially rezoned 10 acres of the old Reinders farm as a tourist attraction, dubbed “Carhenge and the Car Art Reserve.” A non-profit group, the Friends of Carhenge, emerged to care for the site’s maintenance and promotion.
Since 1989, artists have erected about a dozen sculptures on the grassland surrounding Carhenge, all of which are made entirely of cars and auto parts. Two of the highlights are “The Fourd Seasons,” a series of upright cars symbolizing Nebraska’s seasons, and “Spawning Salmon,” an auto-part fish breaching the endless prairie.
An average of 80,000 people visited Carhenge each year from 1994 to 1999, but that number decreased markedly after Nebraska re-routed U.S. 385 in 2000. The area’s busiest highway, U.S. 385 is now three miles west of Carhenge, leaving the Car Art Reserve on the less-trafficked Nebraska Highway 87.For many of today’s visitors, however, the stop was not merely a detour, but the endpoint of their quest.
“What’s going on now, more people have heard of it, more people are fascinated by it, and they make it a destination,” says Paul Phaneuf, president of Friends of Carhenge. “It’s also a place where people can stop and relax. Kids can run around and have a good time.”
“All that mysterious stuff [surrounding Stonehenge] fascinates the imaginations of people,” Phaneuf adds. “It may be for that reason that Carhenge is something that people want to see.”
Beyond the riddle of Stonehenge, Carhenge raises its own set of questions. Particularly at dawn and dusk, an ancient-meets-industrial vibe radiates from the sculpture, a seeming shrine to past, present, and future. The preeminent question: Why?
“Carhenge and Stonehenge were built for the same reason,” answers Reinders.
Stonehenge “has been a burial spot, a place of worship,” he continues. “Some people say it was built for navigating the stars, but I think that’s baloney. I think the builders said, ‘Hey, baby, we were here. We lived a life. This is a monument to our time on earth.'”
Ditto, says Reinders, for Carhenge.
