Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to short stuff. I'm Josh Clark.
Speaker 1: There's Charles to Beach Briant, and there's Jerry Jerome wrong
Speaker 1: and over there. Yeah. The only reason need to stop
Speaker 1: that notice because you saw me draw it to a
Speaker 1: close like a conductor. I know you conduct me. That's
Speaker 1: a T shirt. So this is a follow up everyone.
Speaker 1: We do these occasionally. About five this years ago, five
Speaker 1: and a half fish, five and a half ish we
Speaker 1: did have In three quarters we did a full length
Speaker 1: episode on the Roanoke Colony, The Creepy Spooky Crow Ato
Speaker 1: and Mystery of Roanoak so good, and in it we
Speaker 1: spent just a few minutes talking about the dare Stones.
Speaker 1: But when I went back and listened to it again,
Speaker 1: we didn't go into nearly enough detail. And so we're
Speaker 1: gonna do that right now. We are, so just to
Speaker 1: kind of bring you guys back up to date real quick.
Speaker 1: And it still is as a matter of fact, of
Speaker 1: North Carolina near the North Carolina Virginia border. It was
Speaker 1: the first attempt, I believe in in English colony. There
Speaker 1: was a first wave in fiftive that didn't work out,
Speaker 1: and then a second wave. Maybe it was even the
Speaker 1: third wave technically came along in July seven, and this
Speaker 1: ship carried ninety men, seventeen women, and eleven children. And
Speaker 1: it was led by a guy named John White who
Speaker 1: was named the governor of the I guess Roanoke Colony,
Speaker 1: and he had his daughter, Eleanor Dare with him. She
Speaker 1: was married to uh Anna I a Stare. I think
Speaker 1: that's how you say that great sixteenth century name. It
Speaker 1: sure is and Anna and I as I just want
Speaker 1: to say that all the time. And Eleanor had a baby,
Speaker 1: the first English born or English baby born in America,
Speaker 1: whose name was Virginia Dare. Now do you know if
Speaker 1: they did it in America? Was the conceived in America
Speaker 1: or just born in America? I don't know. I don't know. Actually,
Speaker 1: I'm kind of I'm just kind of curious. It doesn't
Speaker 1: really matter, because what really matters is this was the
Speaker 1: first English baby born in the New World. And it
Speaker 1: was a very big deal for little baby Virginia to
Speaker 1: come along. It was so um. In short order, Virginia's grandfather,
Speaker 1: John White, the head of the colony, says, hey, guys,
Speaker 1: I'm kind of bored. I'm gonna go back to England.
Speaker 1: And I'll get some supplies. I'll be back within a year.
Speaker 1: You guys sit tight, just keep building this colony up,
Speaker 1: and uh, it'll be all good b RB. Right. But
Speaker 1: he did not b RB. He beat a long time
Speaker 1: from coming back, right, And about three years worth comes
Speaker 1: back and no one's there. His daughter's gone, his grand
Speaker 1: little Virginia's gone. Everybody's gone. Um, the buildings are dismantled.
Speaker 1: And as you learned in that episode, the word crow
Speaker 1: at Owen was carved and that was in a I
Speaker 1: guess it was a tree, right, Yeah, they carved into
Speaker 1: a tree, and crow Tone was the name of a
Speaker 1: friendly nearby tribe that the English had been in contact with.
Speaker 1: That's right. So, uh, what was not there was across
Speaker 1: and White said, hey, listen, if there's you know, some
Speaker 1: bad stuff going on, and you guys have to split
Speaker 1: like just to take some time to carve across into
Speaker 1: a tree, so I'll know that bad stuff happened. That
Speaker 1: cross was not there. So there's always been a big
Speaker 1: mystery about what crow a Tone was all about why
Speaker 1: there was no cross and what happened to the hundred
Speaker 1: and eighteen settlers, Like that was it? There was that
Speaker 1: was the that was the sum total of the evidence,
Speaker 1: and John White asked around a little bit, didn't try
Speaker 1: all that hard to find him actually for it being
Speaker 1: the you know, his daughter, his son in law and
Speaker 1: his granddaughter and the first American, right exactly, first English American. Sure, um,
Speaker 1: you want to get us killed? Uh? And uh so
Speaker 1: he he goes back to England and the mystery just
Speaker 1: sets in. When Jamestown settlers come along, they ask around,
Speaker 1: they hear, they hear rumors of um tribes that are
Speaker 1: made up of like light skinned people who speak English
Speaker 1: and live in two story thatched roof houses. Um. But
Speaker 1: none of it is ever confirmed. There's no evidence whatsoever
Speaker 1: what happened to these lost colonists at Roanoke. And that's
Speaker 1: the way it was for three d and fifty is
Speaker 1: years until uh the summer of nine seven, when a
Speaker 1: guy from California named L. E. Hammond, which, as i've
Speaker 1: I've found, um is not to be confused with Lah
Speaker 1: Hammond Inferno, which is a synth band that I came
Speaker 1: across today accidentally, I kind of they're pretty good. Um.
Speaker 1: His name was actually Lewis Hammond, but he was a
Speaker 1: produced dealer from California, and he showed up at Emory
Speaker 1: University and said, Hey, I'm on vacation in North Carolina
Speaker 1: with my wife looking for hickory nuts as you do.
Speaker 1: And I found this weird stone. What do you guys
Speaker 1: make of this thing? Yeah, so Emory's right here in Atlanta.
Speaker 1: And it was inscribed and with a message, and he said,
Speaker 1: can you guys tell me what this says? And I'm
Speaker 1: gonna read it right now in full. This is the
Speaker 1: sort of you know, modernized version, because it was it's
Speaker 1: sort of like reading Jeffrey Chaucer or something, so it
Speaker 1: has to get translated. So here's what it said. Father.
Speaker 1: Soon after you go for England, we came here only
Speaker 1: misery and war for two years above half dead. These
Speaker 1: two years more from sickness. Being twenty four, a savage
Speaker 1: with a message of a ship came to us. Within
Speaker 1: a small space of time, they became frightened of revenge
Speaker 1: and ran all away. We believe it was not you.
Speaker 1: Soon after the savages said spirits were angry, suddenly they
Speaker 1: murdered all save seven. That means all but seven. My
Speaker 1: child and annon I as two were slain with much misery.
Speaker 1: Is there any other way that peace Lane is my question?
Speaker 1: Buried all near four miles east of this river, upon
Speaker 1: a small hill, names were written all there on a rock.
Speaker 1: Put this there. Also, if a savage shows this to you,
Speaker 1: we promised you would give them great plenty presents. Right,
Speaker 1: So there you have it. Yeah, And it was E. W. D.
Speaker 1: Eleanor White Dare that's what you would think. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: so the Emery professors are like, where did you get this?
Speaker 1: You may have just solved like a three hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty year old mystery. And Lewis Hammond was like, somewhere
Speaker 1: about fifty miles inland. They went, what did you just say?
Speaker 1: He said, I don't know, about fifty miles from Roanoke
Speaker 1: Island And they said, well, you know, John White, the governor,
Speaker 1: famously reckoned that the Roanoke colonists had moved fifty miles
Speaker 1: into the main So that would definitely coincide with that idea. Um.
Speaker 1: So they went back to this area where um Lewis
Speaker 1: Hammond found this rock and they could not find the spot.
Speaker 1: He couldn't find the spot where he originally found it
Speaker 1: to show them, but he left it with them. I
Speaker 1: think sold it to him. I think is more accurate,
Speaker 1: and then went back to California and was scarcely heard
Speaker 1: from again. That's right. So we're gonna take a break.
Speaker 1: We're gonna come back and tell you, as Paul Harvey
Speaker 1: would say, the rest of the story as sk So
Speaker 1: here's the deal with that original stone. Um, it depends
Speaker 1: on who you talk to. Some people say it was authentic.
Speaker 1: Some people still say it's authentic and may have solved
Speaker 1: the mystery. Some people say no, it was not. We'll
Speaker 1: talk a little bit more about that in a second.
Speaker 1: But what happened was the whole country started talking. Uh.
Speaker 1: That was a professor at Emory name Heywood J. Pierce Jr.
Speaker 1: Who published that paper, published a paper so talking all
Speaker 1: about the stone in the Journal of Southern History in
Speaker 1: ninety eight. He had his father, Heywood J. Pierce, dad,
Speaker 1: and he owned. Daddy owned a college, Burnell University, which
Speaker 1: is in Gainesville, Georgias. Now it was Burnell University. Now
Speaker 1: I think down now just the fever that's properly, it's
Speaker 1: probably out of shirt somewhere. So they started to have
Speaker 1: suspicions because, like you said, when they went back, they
Speaker 1: couldn't really find exactly where he found it. They got
Speaker 1: a I guess a private investigator or somebody in California
Speaker 1: to look into this Hammond guy, and they really couldn't
Speaker 1: find much to corroborate a story or even who he
Speaker 1: said he was, other than his name and address. I
Speaker 1: saw an internet sleuth explained it by saying, you know what,
Speaker 1: this guy was married before in a census, Um, he
Speaker 1: has two children and seven they were still underage, so um,
Speaker 1: he may have been laying low and keeping away from
Speaker 1: publicity so he wouldn't pay child support. Interesting. I thought
Speaker 1: that was a clever, interesting explanation for it, because what
Speaker 1: I found was there was nothing to indicate that this
Speaker 1: guy was actually a fraud, just that they couldn't really
Speaker 1: follow up with them very easily. Yeah, but at the
Speaker 1: very least Pierce and Pierce were uh, still very intrigued
Speaker 1: by this original stone and said, uh, here's a reward
Speaker 1: offered for any additional stones that pop up five bucks.
Speaker 1: And all of a sudden people are like, oh, I
Speaker 1: got some stones, you want some, you want five? You
Speaker 1: wanna give me five dollars, I'll show you some Deir stones. Uh.
Speaker 1: Specifically a man named Bill Eberhardt who was an artist.
Speaker 1: He was a stone cutter from Fulton County right here
Speaker 1: in Atlanta, and he was paid two thousand dollars for
Speaker 1: forty two forgeries that he turned over as de Air stones.
Speaker 1: And it's not like they they said, hey, thanks for
Speaker 1: these forgeries, here's some money. They thought they were they
Speaker 1: were real at the time. But um on the stones,
Speaker 1: the series of stones, it basically tracks Eleanor. It's like
Speaker 1: Eleanor's little break breadcrumb diary that goes all the way
Speaker 1: down to Georgia, almost to Atlanta, and along the way
Speaker 1: she marries a chief from the Cherokee tribe, has another
Speaker 1: daughter named agnes Um you know, uh possibly like becomes
Speaker 1: romantically entangled with Tom Hanks over email for a little while,
Speaker 1: and then ends up dying in a cave in Georgia.
Speaker 1: I just love the idea of this stone cutter, like
Speaker 1: inventing the storyline, you know, right, He's like, this is
Speaker 1: the life I wish I had had. You know, you
Speaker 1: could have been a screenwriter, Bill Everhard. I wonder, who
Speaker 1: if he's got to have family here still, this is
Speaker 1: just like the late thirties in Fulton County. Man, I
Speaker 1: hope somebody's listening. They're like stop talking about my uncle
Speaker 1: Bill like this. I think it's great. I guess all right,
Speaker 1: so this is uh the flash ward In April, the
Speaker 1: Saturday Evening Post said, you know what, these Norman Rockwell
Speaker 1: covers are great, but what we really want to do
Speaker 1: is run an expose on these Dare Stones and basically
Speaker 1: shut it down as a complete forgery. Yeah. They they
Speaker 1: did some real leg work to just totally undermine the
Speaker 1: Daar Stones, which really kind of goes to to point
Speaker 1: out how much the Dare Stones had totally captured the
Speaker 1: imagination of the entire country. Um, this was a big, big,
Speaker 1: widely publicized deal, and Saturday Evening Post came along and said, no,
Speaker 1: look at this crack in this crack in this crack,
Speaker 1: and basically, by the end of the article had just
Speaker 1: completely revealed the whole thing as a hoax. And definitely
Speaker 1: everything after that first one that Lewis Hammond found is
Speaker 1: most decidedly at hoax at best. The Lewis Hammond stone is,
Speaker 1: like you were saying, up for debate. But the Saturday
Speaker 1: Evening Post said, no, there's anachronistic language in there. Things
Speaker 1: like reconnoiter would not have been used. Um, there's a
Speaker 1: problem with the fact that they used Arabic numerals um,
Speaker 1: which didn't come into into use until later on. It's
Speaker 1: weird that she made like vs instead of use, which
Speaker 1: is kind of like Roman lettering a little bit. Um.
Speaker 1: And at the time when the Saturday Evening Post dropped
Speaker 1: this article, I was like, oh, well, that's it. It's
Speaker 1: a total, total fraud and a total hoax. But as
Speaker 1: the years kind of went by and bright Now University
Speaker 1: suffered a tremendous public relations crisis as a result of this.
Speaker 1: A lot of people looked really bad for verifying these
Speaker 1: stones is authentic and then just being totally undermined by
Speaker 1: the Saturday Evening Post br Now and and um, everyone
Speaker 1: related to the stones almost literally buried them away in
Speaker 1: a basement and then later on in an attic and
Speaker 1: br now and tried to forget about it as much
Speaker 1: as possible. Yeah, Pierce and Pierce had egg on their
Speaker 1: face and that was no good. But people today say
Speaker 1: again that it's possible that first one might be like,
Speaker 1: for real, Um, it's different rock than these other ones.
Speaker 1: It's this white, really bright white quartzite interior and has
Speaker 1: a dark exterior, so it would have been something really good,
Speaker 1: like almost like a chalkboard for her to use, So
Speaker 1: that sort of makes sense. And um, it doesn't have
Speaker 1: this anachronistic language that those other stones do. Uh. The
Speaker 1: sign off is a little weird with E W D
Speaker 1: because that's probably not what she would have done in
Speaker 1: the sixteenth century. Other people say, no, no, no, it's
Speaker 1: still that Chowen riverstone is a phony. And what they're
Speaker 1: hoping is is that modern techniques can uh kind of
Speaker 1: test this thing out at some point and see if
Speaker 1: it's in fact legit. Yeah, because it's basically been cleared
Speaker 1: by a lot of the humanities. People like there's an
Speaker 1: expert in medieval graffiti, um who said this actually checks
Speaker 1: out pretty well. Here's an example of somebody using Arabic numerals,
Speaker 1: here's an example of somebody signing their name in this
Speaker 1: kind of UM kind of abbreviation UM. So a lot
Speaker 1: of it's been explained away. And the fact that it
Speaker 1: is white quartzite, that when she carved it, like you said,
Speaker 1: it would have been like a chalkboard. That would be
Speaker 1: a terrible stone for a forger to choose, because you
Speaker 1: would have to go to tremendous amounts of trouble to
Speaker 1: to to fake it. Basically you just choose a different stone. Um.
Speaker 1: So the fact that that it would have been really
Speaker 1: hard to forge and they tried at the time of
Speaker 1: the Saturday Evening Post article to forge it three different
Speaker 1: ways and nobody could do it, um really lends a
Speaker 1: lot of credence to it. Keeps hope alive that this
Speaker 1: first stone, the original stone, is actually real. Right, so
Speaker 1: maybe we'll find out one day, is our technology advance
Speaker 1: is what happened to the original callings at roh Noke,
Speaker 1: or that this stone says exactly how it happened. So alright, Chuck,
Speaker 1: you got anything else? Nothing else? Well, that is it
Speaker 1: for short stuff everybody. Oh wait, Jerry, you got anything else? Okay,
Speaker 1: Well that's it for short stuff everybody. Uh. You can
Speaker 1: read a really great article on the dre Stones on
Speaker 1: how stuff Works, and you can listen to our original
Speaker 1: row Noke episode two at Stuff you Should Know dot
Speaker 1: com and uh, in the meantime, we'll see you next
Speaker 1: time short stuff out. Stuff you Should Know is a
Speaker 1: production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
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