Short Stuff: Dare Stones

We do these occasionally. About five this years ago, five and a half fish, five and a half ish we did have In three quarters we did a full length episode on the Roanoke Colony, The Creepy Spooky Crow Ato and Mystery of Roanoak so good, and in it we spent just a few minutes talking about the dare Stones. But when I went back and listened to it again, we didn't go into nearly enough detail. And so we're gonna do that right now. We are, so just to kind of bring you guys back up to date real quick.

And it still is as a matter of fact, of North Carolina near the North Carolina Virginia border. It was the first attempt, I believe in in English colony. There was a first wave in fiftive that didn't work out, and then a second wave. Maybe it was even the third wave technically came along in July seven, and this ship carried ninety men, seventeen women, and eleven children. And it was led by a guy named John White who was named the governor of the I guess Roanoke Colony,

and he had his daughter, Eleanor Dare with him. She was married to uh Anna I a Stare. I think that's how you say that great sixteenth century name. It sure is and Anna and I as I just want to say that all the time. And Eleanor had a baby, the first English born or English baby born in America, whose name was Virginia Dare. Now do you know if they did it in America? Was the conceived in America or just born in America? I don't know. I don't know. Actually,

I'm kind of I'm just kind of curious. It doesn't really matter, because what really matters is this was the first English baby born in the New World. And it was a very big deal for little baby Virginia to come along. It was so um. In short order, Virginia's grandfather, John White, the head of the colony, says, hey, guys, I'm kind of bored. I'm gonna go back to England. And I'll get some supplies. I'll be back within a year. You guys sit tight, just keep building this colony up,

and uh, it'll be all good b RB. Right. But he did not b RB. He beat a long time from coming back, right, And about three years worth comes back and no one's there. His daughter's gone, his grand little Virginia's gone. Everybody's gone. Um, the buildings are dismantled.

And as you learned in that episode, the word crow at Owen was carved and that was in a I guess it was a tree, right, Yeah, they carved into a tree, and crow Tone was the name of a friendly nearby tribe that the English had been in contact with. That's right. So, uh, what was not there was across and White said, hey, listen, if there's you know, some bad stuff going on, and you guys have to split like just to take some time to carve across into a tree, so I'll know that bad stuff happened. That

cross was not there. So there's always been a big mystery about what crow a Tone was all about why there was no cross and what happened to the hundred and eighteen settlers, Like that was it? There was that was the that was the sum total of the evidence, and John White asked around a little bit, didn't try all that hard to find him actually for it being the you know, his daughter, his son in law and his granddaughter and the first American, right exactly, first English American. Sure, um,

you want to get us killed? Uh? And uh so he he goes back to England and the mystery just sets in. When Jamestown settlers come along, they ask around, they hear, they hear rumors of um tribes that are made up of like light skinned people who speak English and live in two story thatched roof houses. Um. But none of it is ever confirmed. There's no evidence whatsoever

what happened to these lost colonists at Roanoke. And that's the way it was for three d and fifty is years until uh the summer of nine seven, when a guy from California named L. E. Hammond, which, as i've I've found, um is not to be confused with Lah Hammond Inferno, which is a synth band that I came

across today accidentally, I kind of they're pretty good. Um. His name was actually Lewis Hammond, but he was a produced dealer from California, and he showed up at Emory University and said, Hey, I'm on vacation in North Carolina with my wife looking for hickory nuts as you do. And I found this weird stone. What do you guys make of this thing? Yeah, so Emory's right here in Atlanta. And it was inscribed and with a message, and he said, can you guys tell me what this says? And I'm

gonna read it right now in full. This is the sort of you know, modernized version, because it was it's sort of like reading Jeffrey Chaucer or something, so it has to get translated. So here's what it said. Father. Soon after you go for England, we came here only misery and war for two years above half dead. These two years more from sickness. Being twenty four, a savage with a message of a ship came to us. Within a small space of time, they became frightened of revenge

and ran all away. We believe it was not you. Soon after the savages said spirits were angry, suddenly they murdered all save seven. That means all but seven. My child and annon I as two were slain with much misery. Is there any other way that peace Lane is my question? Buried all near four miles east of this river, upon a small hill, names were written all there on a rock. Put this there. Also, if a savage shows this to you, we promised you would give them great plenty presents. Right,

So there you have it. Yeah, And it was E. W. D. Eleanor White Dare that's what you would think. Yeah, And so the Emery professors are like, where did you get this? You may have just solved like a three hundred and fifty year old mystery. And Lewis Hammond was like, somewhere about fifty miles inland. They went, what did you just say?

He said, I don't know, about fifty miles from Roanoke Island And they said, well, you know, John White, the governor, famously reckoned that the Roanoke colonists had moved fifty miles into the main So that would definitely coincide with that idea. Um. So they went back to this area where um Lewis Hammond found this rock and they could not find the spot. He couldn't find the spot where he originally found it to show them, but he left it with them. I

think sold it to him. I think is more accurate, and then went back to California and was scarcely heard from again. That's right. So we're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back and tell you, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story as sk So here's the deal with that original stone. Um, it depends on who you talk to. Some people say it was authentic. Some people still say it's authentic and may have solved

the mystery. Some people say no, it was not. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. But what happened was the whole country started talking. Uh. That was a professor at Emory name Heywood J. Pierce Jr. Who published that paper, published a paper so talking all about the stone in the Journal of Southern History in ninety eight. He had his father, Heywood J. Pierce, dad, and he owned. Daddy owned a college, Burnell University, which

is in Gainesville, Georgias. Now it was Burnell University. Now I think down now just the fever that's properly, it's probably out of shirt somewhere. So they started to have suspicions because, like you said, when they went back, they couldn't really find exactly where he found it. They got a I guess a private investigator or somebody in California to look into this Hammond guy, and they really couldn't find much to corroborate a story or even who he

said he was, other than his name and address. I saw an internet sleuth explained it by saying, you know what, this guy was married before in a census, Um, he has two children and seven they were still underage, so um, he may have been laying low and keeping away from

publicity so he wouldn't pay child support. Interesting. I thought that was a clever, interesting explanation for it, because what I found was there was nothing to indicate that this guy was actually a fraud, just that they couldn't really follow up with them very easily. Yeah, but at the very least Pierce and Pierce were uh, still very intrigued by this original stone and said, uh, here's a reward offered for any additional stones that pop up five bucks.

And all of a sudden people are like, oh, I got some stones, you want some, you want five? You wanna give me five dollars, I'll show you some Deir stones. Uh. Specifically a man named Bill Eberhardt who was an artist. He was a stone cutter from Fulton County right here in Atlanta, and he was paid two thousand dollars for forty two forgeries that he turned over as de Air stones. And it's not like they they said, hey, thanks for these forgeries, here's some money. They thought they were they

were real at the time. But um on the stones, the series of stones, it basically tracks Eleanor. It's like Eleanor's little break breadcrumb diary that goes all the way down to Georgia, almost to Atlanta, and along the way she marries a chief from the Cherokee tribe, has another daughter named agnes Um you know, uh possibly like becomes romantically entangled with Tom Hanks over email for a little while, and then ends up dying in a cave in Georgia.

I just love the idea of this stone cutter, like inventing the storyline, you know, right, He's like, this is the life I wish I had had. You know, you could have been a screenwriter, Bill Everhard. I wonder, who if he's got to have family here still, this is just like the late thirties in Fulton County. Man, I hope somebody's listening. They're like stop talking about my uncle

Bill like this. I think it's great. I guess all right, so this is uh the flash ward In April, the Saturday Evening Post said, you know what, these Norman Rockwell covers are great, but what we really want to do is run an expose on these Dare Stones and basically shut it down as a complete forgery. Yeah. They they did some real leg work to just totally undermine the Daar Stones, which really kind of goes to to point out how much the Dare Stones had totally captured the

imagination of the entire country. Um, this was a big, big, widely publicized deal, and Saturday Evening Post came along and said, no, look at this crack in this crack in this crack, and basically, by the end of the article had just completely revealed the whole thing as a hoax. And definitely everything after that first one that Lewis Hammond found is most decidedly at hoax at best. The Lewis Hammond stone is, like you were saying, up for debate. But the Saturday

Evening Post said, no, there's anachronistic language in there. Things like reconnoiter would not have been used. Um, there's a problem with the fact that they used Arabic numerals um, which didn't come into into use until later on. It's weird that she made like vs instead of use, which is kind of like Roman lettering a little bit. Um. And at the time when the Saturday Evening Post dropped this article, I was like, oh, well, that's it. It's

a total, total fraud and a total hoax. But as the years kind of went by and bright Now University suffered a tremendous public relations crisis as a result of this. A lot of people looked really bad for verifying these stones is authentic and then just being totally undermined by the Saturday Evening Post br Now and and um, everyone related to the stones almost literally buried them away in a basement and then later on in an attic and br now and tried to forget about it as much

as possible. Yeah, Pierce and Pierce had egg on their face and that was no good. But people today say again that it's possible that first one might be like, for real, Um, it's different rock than these other ones. It's this white, really bright white quartzite interior and has a dark exterior, so it would have been something really good, like almost like a chalkboard for her to use, So that sort of makes sense. And um, it doesn't have

this anachronistic language that those other stones do. Uh. The sign off is a little weird with E W D because that's probably not what she would have done in the sixteenth century. Other people say, no, no, no, it's still that Chowen riverstone is a phony. And what they're hoping is is that modern techniques can uh kind of test this thing out at some point and see if it's in fact legit. Yeah, because it's basically been cleared

by a lot of the humanities. People like there's an expert in medieval graffiti, um who said this actually checks out pretty well. Here's an example of somebody using Arabic numerals, here's an example of somebody signing their name in this kind of UM kind of abbreviation UM. So a lot of it's been explained away. And the fact that it is white quartzite, that when she carved it, like you said,

it would have been like a chalkboard. That would be a terrible stone for a forger to choose, because you would have to go to tremendous amounts of trouble to to to fake it. Basically you just choose a different stone. Um. So the fact that that it would have been really hard to forge and they tried at the time of the Saturday Evening Post article to forge it three different ways and nobody could do it, um really lends a lot of credence to it. Keeps hope alive that this

first stone, the original stone, is actually real. Right, so maybe we'll find out one day, is our technology advance is what happened to the original callings at roh Noke, or that this stone says exactly how it happened. So alright, Chuck, you got anything else? Nothing else? Well, that is it for short stuff everybody. Oh wait, Jerry, you got anything else? Okay,

Well that's it for short stuff everybody. Uh. You can read a really great article on the dre Stones on how stuff Works, and you can listen to our original row Noke episode two at Stuff you Should Know dot com and uh, in the meantime, we'll see you next time short stuff out. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H