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.
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| 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?
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
