Georgetown is the site of a little-known historical monument that a government survey crew emplaced on the lower flanks of Griffith Mountain in June, 1873. The monument, labeled on the modern USGS topographic map as an "astronomic monument," marks the site of a month-long effort to determine the latitude, longitude, and altitude at Georgetown by Lt. George M. Wheeler's U.S. Army survey team. The study was part of Wheeler's ambitious scheme to map the West under a project titled "United States Geographical Surveys West of the One-Hundredth Meridian." Oddly, the stone monument in Georgetown was the subject of some debate in the press, a debate involving Wheeler himself, as to its lithology and origin: Was it granite or sandstone? Shipped from Maine or hauled from southern Colorado?

Dr. F. Kampf headed the Georgetown party. All we know about him personally is that he was an "astronomic observer and computer." He and his crew arrived in Georgetown on June 5 and set up camp near Alpine Creek on a knoll overlooking the town. The rectangular block of stone arrived two days later, and the crew set it in place at the camp site. In the following weeks, Kampf calculated the geographic coordinates of the monument site based on his astronomical measurements, which he coordinated telegraphically with similar measurements being made concurrently in Salt Lake City. The party also made detailed observations of barometric pressures and temperatures to assist in altitude determinations.

The Weekly Miner reported the arrival and placement of the stone monument, "a block of Maine granite... weighing several thousand pounds, and hewn into the proper shape at the quarries down East... It is intended that this rock shall be a permanent land-mark for scientific observations [and] will probably remain in its place for several years." Parenthetically, the Miner noted with a touch of sarcasm, "there is no granite out here, we believe."

The editor of The Engineering and Mining Journal picked up on the irony of importing stone from Maine for use in Colorado. "If there is anything abundant about Georgetown," he stated in an editorial note in the edition of July 22, 1873, "one would say it is stone." He further wondered how much it must have cost to blast away granite at the monument site to make room for the imported stone block. The editor correctly observed that the monument is actually made of sandstone, and that such rock is not nearly so durable as the native rock around it. He speculated whether Lt. Wheeler intended to import sandstone from Maine for all the other monuments to be erected in his survey; he offered an alternative approach: "We could point out several boulders, here and there, in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona, which can be warranted not to budge."

This tongue-in-cheek note prompted an indignant retort from Wheeler, who found the editor's comments to be "indecorous." As reported in the October 14 edition of the journal, Wheeler emphatically denied that "the monument was... composed of sandstone from Maine." The editor was moved to make an "immediate and frank apology" for his earlier criticism, but he justified his "Maine" story by saying that it "came to us from several independent quarters, in the form of current and uncontradicted 'town-talk' in Colorado, disarming suspicion as to its authenticity." But the wording of Wheeler's denial still left unanswered questions, according to the editor: "Is there no monument? Or did it not come from Maine? Or is it not of sandstone?... Or - horrid, bitter, bitter thought!- were we outrageously sold, by a foul conspiracy of tongues?"