Carhenge: A Flat-Gray Memorial in the Nebraska Panhandle

In June of nineteen eighty-seven, a man named Jim Reinders assembled thirty-nine automobiles in a pasture outside Alliance, Nebraska, and positioned them to replicate the proportions of Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England. The cars were painted flat gray. They were arranged in a circle with a heel stone, a horseshoe of trilithons, and standing uprights, all placed according to the original monument's dimensions scaled to what the cars could physically achieve.

Reinders built it as a memorial to his father, Don Reinders, who had farmed this land. It was not a statement about ancient mysteries or ley lines or anything supernatural. It was a son's tribute, made from what was available, which happened to be cars.

Alliance was initially unhappy about it. Agricultural land was being used for a car sculpture. After several years of local controversy, the city recognized what it had, which was something genuinely unusual: a roadside monument that existed for no reason except one family's love of one dead farmer, expressed at a scale and in a material that no one had thought to use before.

The Car Art Reserve now surrounds it: additional automobile sculptures in various configurations, added over the years by local artists. It is free to enter. There is no guard. Cars rust and are occasionally repainted.

There is nothing else like it in North America. The Great Plains is large enough to contain this, which is perhaps the most Nebraskan thing that can be said about it.