The Blue Rocks is a half-mile-long boulder field in Lenhartsville, Pennsylvania, with a geomythic origin story akin to other unusual geologic formations such as the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming and Crater Lake in Oregon. Said to have been created by the devil in a fit of rage after mistaking rocks for potatoes, the boulder field consists of angular blocks of Tuscarora quartzite ranging in size from four inches to twenty feet, with a grayish-blue hue. Described as a “natural curiosity” by a 1913 history book of Berks County, the site has attracted much attention through the years. Since 1930, the area has been converted into a tourist attraction called the Blue Rocks Family Campground.
Since the folklore of the Blue Rocks remains a mostly local and oral tradition, locating dates and sources of origin stories remains elusive. Outside of a few passing references in various sources, like the brief entry in S. E. Schlosser’s Spooky Pennsylvania, the author is not aware of any definitive folkloric analysis of the Blue Rocks. Although tales associated with the Blue Rocks lack rigorous academic cataloging, the most popular local folktales are clearly in the tradition of what Dorothy B. Vitaliano has termed “geomythology,” folkloristic explanations for unusual geologic formations.
The most common story concerning the Blue Rocks tells of how the devil angrily emptied sacks of rocks, which he had mistaken for potatoes, into the fields, rivers, and mountains of Lenhartsville. More specifically, as most renditions of the story go, the devil had become enamored of the area’s famed and flavorful potatoes. Unfamiliar with the vegetable, the devil asked for a description. He was told that potatoes were round and hard and that some were large and some were small. Beginning a potato-picking jaunt with no more information than this, the devil proceeded to collect everything hard and round he could find, placing them in his carrying sacks. In due time, the devil had thousands of hard and round objects he presumed to be potatoes, and he had his hopes set on collecting many more. Finally, one of the devil’s trusted minions gathered enough courage to inform his overlord that objects in the sacks were not potatoes at all. The objects were, in fact, rocks.
News of his mishap sent the devil into a tantrum, and he shouted, jumped, and stomped in fury. Eventually, in his outrage, he opened his sacks of mistaken potatoes and began throwing them everywhere—into gullies, into rivers, on top of mountains, and into fields. Many of the discarded rocks piled into an empty field where they got stuck. The rocks were so embedded into that field that no one could move them, and so there the rocks stayed. Since the stone field could no longer be farmed, the locals of Lenhartsville turned the location into a meeting place. And thus, the most well-known story of the Blue Rocks concludes.
Perhaps less well known, there was once a time when many believed that the area surrounding the Blue Rocks was a Native American burial ground of the Schuylkill Indians. The belief has some credibility. First, there are several noticeable mounds in the area. Moreover, the land was once inhabited by the Wolf Tribe of which the Schuylkill Indians were a part. Between the years 1754 and 1763 white settlers routinely clashed with Schuylkill Indians over the land and much blood was spilled. By 1820, the Schuylkills were forced away from the Blue Rocks and moved north to the Blue Mountain area. It is conceivable, and perhaps even probable, that Native Americans were laid to rest in or around the region. In his 1897 book The Indians of Berks County, Pa., David B. Brunner, however, makes note of several failed attempts to find any such graves. A 1910 article in The Pennsylvania-German by O. A. Richards, a former resident of nearby Hamburg, Pennsylvania, reported that only a few locals held the belief that the area around the Blue Rocks served as a burial ground. The idea, however, still remains in a handful of descriptions of the Blue Rocks.
The Blue Rocks has also piqued the curiosity of geologists and other scientists. Scientifically speaking, the boulder field formed as a result of a process called solifluction (a slow downhill flow of geologic mass due to freeze-thaw activity). Today, such intriguing stories of the Blue Rocks get little lip service. The site is now a full-fledged tourist attraction replete with a basketball court and bouncy castle.
Todd K. Platts
See also Legend Tripping; Lithobolia, or Stone-Throwing Devil; Mound Builder Myth; Name Lore and Magic
Further Reading
Potter, Noel, Jr., and John H. Moss. 1968. “Origin of the Blue Rocks Block Field and Adjacent Deposits, Berks County, Pennsylvania.” Geological Society of America Bulletin 79 (2): 255–262.
Schlosser, S. E. 2007. Spooky Pennsylvania: Tales of Hauntings, Strange Happenings, and Other Local Lore. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press.
Vitaliano, Dorothy B. 1973. Legends of the Earth: Their Geologic Origins. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Wagner, A. E., F. W. Balthaser, and D. K. Hoch. 1913. The Story of Berks County (Pennsylvania). Reading, PA: Eagle Book and Job Press.