Nebraska: Alliance – Car Henge art installation

🚗 Carhenge — When Someone Decided Nebraska Needed a Bit of Stonehenge

We have driven across the American mid-west. If you haven’t, let me save you the suspense: it’s flat. Enormously, relentlessly, almost heroically flat. Mile after mile of corn, soy, wheat, and the occasional grain silo standing on the horizon like a lonely sentinel who’s given up hoping for company. The sky is huge, the road is straight, and after about the fourth hour your brain starts to quietly negotiate with your body about whether any of this was really necessary.

Coffee helps. Comfort breaks help. Podcasts help. What also helps, it turns out, is the occasional human being who looked at all that emptiness and thought, “You know what this needs? Art.”

Which brings us, rather wonderfully, to Carhenge.

Carhenge sits just outside the small town of Alliance in western Nebraska — population around eight thousand, which makes it practically a metropolis by the standards of the surrounding countryside. The site itself covers around ten acres, and at its heart is one of the more gloriously daft things we have ever clapped eyes on: a full-scale replica of Stonehenge, built entirely from old American automobiles.

Yes, really.

The man responsible for all this was Jim Reinders, and to understand why he did it, you need to know a bit about the original Stonehenge — which, as it happens, Reinders knew rather a lot about, because he spent a good chunk of his life living in England. During that time he made a proper study of the place: its layout, its dimensions, its ancient astronomical alignments, and presumably also its gift shop and the persistent drizzle. He became genuinely fascinated by it, and when he eventually returned to the United States, the idea of recreating it clearly never quite left him.

Stonehenge itself, for anyone who needs a refresher, is a prehistoric monument on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, built in several stages between roughly 3000 BC and 1500 BC. The massive sarsen stones that form the famous circle weigh up to twenty-five tonnes each and are believed to have been dragged from Marlborough Downs, about twenty-five miles away — a logistical achievement so baffling that people have been arguing about how they managed it ever since. The site has been associated with everything from druid ceremonies to astronomical calendars, and it remains one of the most visited and most studied prehistoric monuments in the world. English Heritage now manages it, which means there’s a visitor centre, a café, and a firmly enforced one-way system. Progress.

Reinders took the dimensions of Stonehenge seriously. The original monument’s outer circle measures approximately 97 feet — about 29 metres — in diameter, and Carhenge matches that almost exactly. Rather than sourcing multi-tonne blocks of ancient sarsen, however, Reinders worked with what was available in rural Nebraska, which was chiefly: old cars. Thirty-nine of them, to be precise — Cadillacs, Plymouths, Fords, and various other veterans of America’s automotive golden age, sourced from farms and scrapyards and anywhere else they could be found.

Some were buried boot-first in the ground to form the upright elements. Others were welded across the top to create the distinctive lintels. The whole lot was then painted a uniform grey to suggest the weathered stone of the original — and it works, rather more than you’d expect. Stand back a bit, squint slightly, and there’s something genuinely eerie and impressive about it.

The story behind Carhenge is, if anything, more moving than the structure itself.

Reinders built it as a memorial to his father, who had farmed the land in Nebraska where the installation now stands. In 1982, the family gathered in Alliance following his father’s funeral, and in the way that families sometimes do in moments of grief, conversation turned to the question of what kind of memorial might feel right. Reinders floated the idea of the Stonehenge replica — partly as a tribute, partly as a creative act, and possibly partly because grief does funny things to people and sometimes the most heartfelt impulse is also the most unexpected one.

The family were apparently on board. Construction followed, which must have made for some interesting weekends.

Carhenge was formally dedicated on the Summer Solstice of 1987 — the 21st of June, the same date on which Stonehenge’s solar alignments are at their most dramatic, and the occasion of large annual gatherings at the original site in Wiltshire. It was a considered choice, and it gave the whole thing a proper sense of occasion.

Since then, additional sculptures have been added to the wider site, which is now formally known as the Car Art Reserve. These include a fish made from car parts, a spawning dinosaur, and various other metal constructions that suggest the local artistic community has been having an excellent time of it. It’s the sort of place where creativity seems to breed creativity, which is either very inspiring or evidence that too many people have been driving through Nebraska without enough to look at.

We will be honest: we weren’t entirely sure what to expect when we turned off the main road and headed towards Alliance. The words “car sculpture” and “Nebraska” do not necessarily combine in the imagination to produce something worth going out of your way for.

We were wrong. It’s genuinely worth a look — strange, slightly funny, oddly poignant, and far better executed than its premise suggests. There’s something about the scale of it, out there on the open plain with nothing much around it, that gives it a peculiar dignity. Reinders clearly cared about getting the proportions right, and that attention to the original has paid off.

If you find yourself passing through western Nebraska — and statistically speaking, the odds are against it, but life is full of surprises — do put Carhenge on the schedule. It won’t take long, it costs nothing to visit, and it’s exactly the sort of thing that makes a long, flat road trip suddenly feel worthwhile.