Unrecognized History

I am often amused, when told by students, one of the reasons they love being in Europe is because there is so much history. Actually what they mean is that there is so much recorded and recognized history. North America is full of history that predates the American Revolutionary War; however, the public’s grasp of it is tenuous at best. We tend not to remember the history of North American that was not English-speaking or dominant. Nor do we remember those who lost or fought for noble causes whose efforts were against the mainstream.

While growing up our family visited Roanoke Island, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, several times. One of the things we did that made a huge impression was attending “The Lost Colony” musical play. The play, which was written by Paul Green and premiered in 1937, recounts the trials, tribulations and ultimate mystery of the first permanent English settlement in North America. The musical is performed in an outdoor pavilion on the same spot where the colonists came ashore in July 1587. The play takes liberties with history, but establishes the basic facts about the colony and its disappearance.

The story of the Roanoke colony is compelling. English colonists, ill-prepared to start a thriving community on the barrier islands of North Carolina, arrived in the middle of the summer. They were accompanied by two natives who had visited England, Manteo and Wanchese, and were returning home. Arriving midsummer, the colony would have to wait until the following spring to plant food. Meanwhile, political events on Roanoke had shifted and found Manteo and Wanchese on opposite sides of a political struggle that centered on the role of the newcomers. A month after landing, Eleanor Dare gave birth to a daughter, Virginia, making her the first English child to be born in North America. We know this because John White, Virginia’s grandfather, departed ten days later to return to England for supplies. His return to North Carolina would be delayed because of war between England and Spain. When White managed to return on his granddaughter’s third birthday, he found the colony plundered and abandoned. On the walls of the fort, the word “CROATOAN” carved; on a nearby tree, the letters CRO were found. This was understood to mean that the remaining colonist had taken refuge with Manteo’s tribe at Croatoan, on Hatteras Island. Despite repeated searches no trace of the colonists was ever found.

Legends and hoaxes about the fate of the Roanoke colony flourished. Speculation about the fate of the Lost Colony is a favorite pastime for some. While browsing at the library at Manteo I came across a book arguing that the colonist linked up with the Lumbee Indians and traveled south after they left Roanoke. Over time, according to the legend, the colonists integrated with the tribe. The appearance of the Lumbee suggests that there was some interbreeding with other ethnic groups. Hence, the appearance of Lumbee Indians with European features suggested intermingling between the Lumbees and the English colonists. This theory has been largely discredited. Shortly after our visit in the summer of 2015, an article in the New York Times offered some evidence that, more than three years after its disappearance, the colony might have moved to the mainland. 

Coast of North Carolina: the bay side of Hatteras

Despite the intriguing nature of the mystery, there are other aspects of the story that I find interesting as well. The coast of North Carolina, when seen without hotels, shops and amusements, can be foreboding. The mixture of brackish water, thick swamp forests and relentless insects, especially mosquitoes, doubtlessly made life difficult for anyone in the sixteenth century. It was probably even more difficult for a group of inexperienced English colonists who had no experience on the North American continent. The idea that a group of individuals who were ill prepared for farming and building a colony in the wilderness is startling.

Today, it is fascinating to observe how the “lost colonists” are commemorated and memorialized. Streets in Manteo (named for the young man who traveled to England and befriended the colonists) are named after colonists and friendly Native Americans. The county in which Roanoke sits is named Dare County, after the young girl born just a couple of weeks after the arrival of the colonists. Virginia Dare has many things named after her and yet we know nothing about her past her tenth day. Perhaps one of the most intriguing is a statue in the Elizabethan Gardens is of Virginia as a grown woman. The optimism that Virginia would have survived and thrived in the harsh North Carolina bush is telling. For all the interest and memorializing heaped on Virginia, one cannot help but feel a modicum of sympathy for the child of Margery Harvie, another colonist, who bore a child a few days after Virginia’s birth. While the Dare offspring garners most of the attention through the timing of her birth, history does not even record the name of the poor Harvie child. Given that the Dares were considered leaders of expedition, and were among the political elites of the colony, it would be interesting to know what would have happened if Virginia had been born second. If Margery Harvie, who held a lower social status than Eleanor Dare, had given birth to the first English child born in North America would he/she have been celebrated as much?

Enon Mound (Enon, OH)

We tend to look at history filter through own lens and culture. The Ohio Historical Society has identified 42,682 prehistoric sites in the state. Yet, we do not see this as our history. The Enon Mound (alternatively known as the Knob Prarie Mound) is at least 2,000 years old, meaning that, more than likely, it predates the Roman Empire. Located in the middle of a circular road, appropriately named Mound Circle, in Enon, Ohio, the mound is the second largest conical Indian mound in Ohio. Students travel to Europe to “see” history; however, virtually no one in North America recognizes these artifacts of long vanished civilizations. In many ways these objects have been appropriated. The Enon Mound was reportedly used as an observation post by General George Rogers Clark during the battle at Piqua with Shawnee Indians on 8 August 1780 and, during the 1940s, a cross was planted atop the mound each Easter.

Seip Earthwork Mound (Bainbridge, OH) 

I once again visited the Seip Earthwork Mound, outside of Bainbridge, Ohio, this summer. The mound, which is one of my favorites, sits on a small piece of land with a picnic area and extremely limited facilities. Much like when I first visited the site in the mid-1980s, I had this small park site to myself. When the mound was excavated it was found to contain the bodies of 122 people (men, women and children) with many artifacts and treasures. As part of the Hopewell Culture, Seip Mound was built sometime between 100BC to 700 AD. Thus, while England was under Roman occupation or the confusion that followed, Hopewell people had a flourishing culture in Southcentral Ohio.

Monarch Butterfly near Seip Mound

Trying to imagine what it would have been like to have lived during the Hopewell period, I walked through the small park and watched butterflies frolicked in the tall grass and wild flowers that grow on the mound. Monarchs and swallowtails were in abundance. It was mid-August, warm and humid, and cicadas provided a natural soundtrack as I walked from the primary mound to Paint Creek. As I walked through the grassland, it struck me that while many things had changed, a person walking the same land centuries ago would have seen the same kind of butterflies and birds and would have been pestered by mosquitoes just like me. Whether North Carolina or Ohio, we pretend that we are far removed from the people that inhabited our lands centuries ago. Yet, in many ways, we are the same and it is unfortunate we do not recognize this part of our history.