In 1987, a Nebraska oil engineer who had studied Stonehenge in England returned home and built a full-scale replica out of American cars, half-buried trunks-first.
A Pirep featured story · KAIA Alliance Municipal, Alliance, NE
Jim Reinders grew up on a farm three miles north of Alliance, Nebraska, in the Sandhills — the largest sand-dune grassland in the Western Hemisphere. He left in the 1950s to become a petroleum engineer, and his career eventually took him to the U.K., where he lived for five years and spent weekends driving the chalklands of southern England measuring Neolithic monuments.
In 1982 his father Jim Reinders Sr. died, and Jim Jr. began thinking about how to memorialize him on the family farm. The site was wide and flat and treeless — Sandhills prairie — and the obvious analogue was the open plain at Salisbury where Stonehenge sat. So he decided to build a Stonehenge.
He needed materials that could stand in for ten-ton sarsen stones. He picked American cars and trucks of the kind Nebraska farmers had driven for two generations: 1957 Cadillacs, 1962 Chevy pickups, a 1970s Ford ambulance. Thirty-eight vehicles total. He had them painted flat gray with house paint, hauled them to the farm site on a flatbed, and dug them in.
The standing-stone "uprights" were buried trunk-first into the prairie, five feet of car body sticking up. The horizontal "lintels" were welded across the tops, balanced on the standing cars. The proportions exactly matched the Stonehenge originals. The heel stone — the offset boulder that marks the summer solstice sunrise alignment at the English site — was a 1962 Cadillac.
Carhenge was dedicated at the summer solstice of June 1987 with family members in attendance. Within a year it had become a destination. Today it is administered as a free public attraction by the Friends of Carhenge nonprofit; the surrounding Car Art Reserve has accumulated additional vehicle sculptures over the decades, including a salmon school made from cars cut to shape.
Pilots flying into KAIA Alliance Municipal can spot it three nautical miles north of the field, a 100-foot circle of gray metal sitting alone in unbroken short-grass prairie. The site is open year-round, sunrise to sunset, no entrance fee, no staff on site. The summer solstice alignment still works — every June 21, the sun rises through the heel-stone Cadillac.