Here’s your daily gross-dose of wtf? At the corner of Lexington Ave and S Riverside in Elkhart, Indiana there’s a one-ton concrete block sitting at the intersection that contains thousands of human teeth. Dentophobics, you might want to look away.
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The Elkhart Tooth Stone was created by Dr. Joseph Stamp, a local Elkhart dentist who practiced for 60 years before his death in 1978. In life, Stamp had a rather eccentric hobby of keeping and preserving every tooth he ever extracted from patients in a barrel in his basement. Weird? Yeah, it’s pretty weird. Okay, it’s really weird.
The stone began as a memorial to his beloved dog Prince, and started off as a concrete block embedded with the animals teeth. Over time Stamp continued to add layers of concrete and teeth to the Elkhart Stone right up until his death in the late 70s.
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Over the years people have chipped away at the stone, taking a dental souvenir (gross) or trying to find a gold tooth among the brown and rotten ones (super gross). The stone, which is still in the same location it’s been since the 40s, has become a wonderfully weird part of Elkhart's history, and a place that brings up fond memories for the locals residents.
If you’re headed to Elkhart you can’t leave without grabbing a burger and fries at the neighborhood diner Heinnies, spending an hour or two exploring the Midwest Museum of American Art, and of course paying a visit to the The Elkhart Tooth Stone a.k.a. the grossest intersection maker of all time.
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