BrainStuff Classics: Are the Dare Stones Forgeries or the Key to the Roanoke Mystery?

A year before, when the site was discovered, fifteen men had volunteered to stay and hold down the proverbial fort, but they were nowhere to be found, so the one hundred and eighteen colonists disembarked and set about carving a colony out of the wilderness. There was much excitement when eleanor Dare, the daughter of leader John White, gave birth to the first English baby born in the New World

and named her Virginia. After a time, John White left the settlers to return to England, telling them he'd be back within the year with fresh supplies. However, England's war with Spain slowed the process considerably, and nobody was able to check on the settlement again until fifteen ninety, when White returned, his daughter, granddaughter, and everyone else was gone. They had dismantled the buildings, carved the word Croatoan into a tree, the name of the friendly Native American tribe

on a nearby island, and vanished. There was no sign of the cross White had told them to carve on a tree if they had left under duress. Frankly, White didn't look very hard for his daughter and granddaughter before heading back to England. For centuries, the story of the lost colony of Roanokes seemed pretty cut and dried to most historians. The settlers went to live with a Crowatoin tribe, but whether they stayed there or not, nobody could say.

The thing they could say is that no definitive sign of any of the one hundred and eighteen colonists was ever found, despite rumours in the later established Jamestown colony of massacres and men wearing European clothes deep in the wilderness.

No definitive sign, that is until more than three centuries later, when in nineteen thirty seven, a produce dealer from California named L. E. Hammond showed up at Emory University in Atlanta with a stone he found while hunting hickory nuts in a recently cleared North Carolina swamp some fifty miles or eighty kilometers inland of Roanoke Island. It was inscribed with a message he wanted the experts at Emory to decipher. It turns out the carved stone told a story allegedly

written by White's daughter Eleanor. The colonists endured two years of only misery and war after her father left for England, ending with half the settlers killed in armed combat and many of the others, including Eleanor's husband and daughter, slaughtered. When a spiritual leader of the tribe they lived with warned that the presence of the English settlers was angering the spear. According to the stone, only six men and one woman escaped. The stone was found to be authentic

by the Emery experts. At the time, it seemed legitimate, and better still, it satisfied everyone's thirst foreclosure around this dusty old riddle. The story captured the imagination of the entire country, and Emory professor Heywood J. Pierce Junior published a paper describing the stone in the Reputable Journal of Southern History in nineteen thirty eight. But soon the plausibility of the stone came into question. We spoke with John Bentz,

archivist at the Rose Library at Emory University. He said Emory became suspicious of Hammond after some professors and administrators traveled with him to Edenton, North Carolina, where he found the stone. The search for the original location of the stone was fruitless. This added to the growing list of details about Hammond's discovery that were hard to corroborate. Emory had someone in California look into Hammond, but couldn't find

much more than an address. After Pierce and his father, another academic, paid Hammond for the first stone and offered a five hundred dollars reward for any additional stones people might find. You can imagine how many dair stones came out of the woodwork. The Pierces paid a man named Bill Eberhardt, a stonecutter from Fulton County, Georgia, two thousand

dollars for forty two forgeries he brought them. These stones had Eleanor marrying a Cherokee chief, giving birth to another daughter named Agnes, and eventually dying in a cave in Georgia. In April of nineteen forty one, the Saturday Evening Post ran an expos on the Dairstones, dismissing them all as forgeries, citing anachronistic language and a consistency of spelling that was

unheard of at the time. The Pierce's career suffered, and the daarstones were stuffed in a basement at the father's university, an embarrassment to everyone involved. But every so often academic interest turns again to the Chowan riverstone, the original dairstone

found by Hammond in that North Carolina swamp. It's made of different rock than the others, a bright white quartzite interior and dark exterior that would have made a good choice for Eleanor Dare's missive to her father, and in the nineteen thirties, the patina on the stone would have been difficult to chemically replicate. In addition, it doesn't contain

the anachronistic language of the other stones. Some experts have determined the only problem might be in eleanor Dare's sign off the initials E W D, which would not have been a typical signature in the sixteenth century. Many experts still dismiss the Toowan riverstone as an obvious phony, but it's possible that new research into Elizabethan epigraphy, chemical analysis, and other rock inscriptions of the time period will yet

shed light on this still unsolved mystery. Today's episode is based on the article the Dare Stones Forgery or Key to the Lost Colony of Roanoke Mystery on hostiff works dot com, written by Jesslyn Shields. Brainstuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with houstuff works dot com and is produced by Tyler Clay. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.