Website of Virginia Dare's "alleged" Tombstone is Up
Stephen Horrillo
On 27-Oct-2002, roge...@aol.com (Roger4336) wrote:
> >BTW, do you have corroboration that the supposed discoverer of the
> >first stone, one "L.E. Hammond, a small produce dealer from Alameda,
> >California" was whom he purported to be, or for that matter ever
> >existed? Such a person in 1937 would have had a phone number,
> >possibly a newspaper obituary, a Social Security record, etc.
>
> There are no doubt pieces of evidence which could authenticate the
> existence of
> L. E. Hammond. However, I doubt that he had a Social Security record.
> When
> Social Security was introduced in December 1936, it was limited to people
> who
> were employed in "interstate commerce." That is as far as the writ of the
> U.S.
> federal government ran at the the time. About 60% of the workforce was
> covered
> under the original law.
>
> Mr. Hammond, who bought and sold things in California, probably was not in
> interstate commerce by the then-existing definition.
>
> In any event, he was probably self-employed. Self-employed people were
> not in
> the Social Security system at the outset.
>
> This "gap" between employment and Social Security eligibity narrowed
> considerably after a U.S. Supreme Court in 1942 essentially declared that
> all
> virtually commerce was "interstate commerce," and was thus an appropriate
> subject for Congressional regulation.
>
> -- Roger
Below is an article from the Atanta Journal. The article states that,
Sparkes, the author of the Saturday Evening Post main article that claimed
the stone was a fraud, continued to search for Hammond, until his death in
North Carolina in 1954.
" Boyden Sparkes died on the North Carolina coast in 1954. He kept up a
correspondence over the years with members of the Emory faculty, discussing
his continuing efforts to track down L. E. Hammond. He never found him. "
My website has a clip from the In Search of TV progam and the full article
from the Post. To add to the mystery, Brenau U. say's they still have the
stone. I have one that's identicle and they can't come up with any
explaination. We plan to compare notes/stones soon.
http://www.angelfire.com/ego/iammagi/DARE_INDEX.htm
All the best,
Ste...@stephenhorrillo.com
"Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more"
Also Brenau says they still have the stone. I have one that's identicle. We
plan to get together and compare stones.
THE DARE STONES MYSTERY BYLINE: BY GERDEEN DYER DATE: 04-19-1987
PUBLICATION: The Atlanta Journal and Constitution EDITION: SECTION:
Newspapers_&_Newswires PAGE: M/06
In a stately old building at Gainesville, Ga.'s, Brenau College, in a locked
room that few people visit, a gray slab of quartz rests in a run- down
display case. Carved on the face of this stone is a crude Greek cross, now
barely visible, together with an inscription that few people today can read.
It is an account of a man's death, written in English that is quaintly
worded and strangely spelled, and it is dated 1591. Dozens of other carved
stones lie in a nearby building, piled in a corner of a musty, unlit
basement. Some of these are larger and heavier than the one in the case, but
all of them bear inscriptions in the same archaic English, inscriptions that
seem to date from the time of Queen Elizabeth I and William Shakespeare.
Experts who have examined the writing on the rocks say the language is
indeed Elizabethan, and they have found that the inscriptions, taken
together, tell a story. It is a story of war and massacre, of abduction and
bitter exile. If it is true, these neglected stones, gathered half a century
ago from various locations around the Carolinas and Georgia, hold the
solution to one of America's greatest mysteries - the fate of the Lost
Colony of Roanoke. If the stones are genuine, they are the oldest
English-language relics in the Western Hemisphere. But few people in the
United States, and indeed few people in Gainesville, have ever heard of
them. It seems somehow unnatural that these impressive-looking relics should
be hidden away. But there is a reason. "I think it's been pretty well
established that most of them are fakes,'' says Jim Southerland, a professor
of history at Brenau. He has become, somewhat by default, the chief expert
on these carved curiosities, which are known in scholarly circles as the
Dare stones. The college, he says, does not exhibit the stones as relics of
the Lost Colony because it does not want to "perpetuate a fraud." That
explanation is fine and commendable as far as it goes, but it raises other
questions. Why, if the stones are phony, are they kept here at all? And
where did all the writing come from? The story that answers these questions
is a strange one and, like the stones themselves, almost forgotten. It was
400 years ago, in July 1587, when Gov. John White led a group of English
settlers ashore in what is now North Carolina. They called the place
Virginia, and, though previous settlers at the same site had been killed by
Indians, White and his followers were determined to live there permanently,
and to live in peace. Among the colonists were numerous women, including
White's daughter, Eleanor Dare, who was accompanied by her husband, Ananias.
White stayed at the colony only a month before he was persuaded to return
to England on important business. In that time, however, he worked to mend
relations with the Indians, and he saw another generation added to his
family. Eleanor gave birth to a daughter, Virginia, the first English child
born in America. Before he set sail for England, White talked with the
settlers about what would happen if they were forced to move in his absence.
It was agreed that they would leave carved messages to indicate their
destination; if they fled "in distresse," they would carve a cross. White
expected to return to his colony within a few months, but war changed his
plans. England, facing the superior might of Spain, was locked in a struggle
for survival; men and ships were pressed into service for the coming
confrontation with the Spanish Armada. Months of separation stretched into
years. England defeated the armada, and survived the war, but the little
colony did not. When White returned in 1590, he found none of the 119 men,
women and children he had left behind. There was only the word "CROATOAN"
carved on a tree. There was no cross. Little evidence was found of what
happened to the Lost Colony, but over the centuries there was plenty of
speculation. Some people theorized that the settlers had been wiped out by
hostile Indians, while others believed that they had been absorbed by a
friendly tribe. Legends grew up around the disappearance, and the site of
the colony became a tourist attraction. But no one really knew what had
become of the colonists. In November 1937, a man named L. E. Hammond
showed up at Emory University with a peculiar-looking rock. Hammond was from
California, but he had found the stone, he said, in a North Carolina swamp.
Something was written on it, and though he had cleaned the surface, he could
not make out what it said. He was looking for someone who could. The stone
was passed around the faculty at Emory, and became "something to play with,"
one of the professors recalled years later. Eventually, it was turned over
to Dr. Haywood Pearce Jr., a history professor at Emory who was also vice
president of Brenau College. Pearce's specialty was not Colonial America,
but when he deciphered what was written on the face of the stone, he knew
that he was looking at something significant. The inscription read "Ananias
Dare & Virginia went hence unto heaven 1591." The stone was either a
priceless historical find or a brazen hoax, and word of it soon spread
beyond Emory. Rumors began to circulate that the university had obtained the
gravestone of Virginia Dare, and perhaps had found the grave itself. Pearce
denied these rumors, while working to decipher a much longer message carved
on the other side of the stone. But it was not an easy task; the
inscriptions were faint, and the English was almost like a foreign language.
Finally, the message was decoded, and it was a historian's dream. Signed
with the initials of Eleanor White Dare, it was an account of a move from
the Roanoke site and of a later attack by "salvages" that had left all but
seven of the colonists dead. It described a nearby hill that was a burial
site for 17 colonists. Sensing that a major discovery was within their
grasp, Pearce and other Atlanta scholars persuaded Hammond to lead them to
the place where the stone was found. Hammond took them to a swamp along the
Chowan River, near Edenton, N.C., about 80 miles from the site of the
Roanoke colony. They searched but found nothing more. Pearce eventually made
five trips to this desolate area, sometimes accompanied by his father,
Haywood Pearce Sr., president of Brenau, and the two men offered a reward to
encourage local people to search for the graveyard. In all these efforts
they were unsuccessful. The story of the stone was public then, but the
search had come to a dead end, and most people at Emory, except for Pearce,
began to lose interest. Many of them had grown suspicious of Hammond, who
showed a keen interest in profiting from his discovery. The finder of the
Dare stone was remarkably vague about his background, and his address in
California apparently consisted of no more than a post office box. He was
adept at maintaining the mystery; no photograph of him was ever taken, and
attempts to follow him or obtain his fingerprints came to nothing. Pearce
and his family decided to move the stone to Brenau, and, as payment, they
mailed $1,000 to Hammond in California. That was a large sum during the Dep
ression, and the Pearces already had spent a great deal of time and money on
their expeditions to North Carolina. But events soon would convince them
their efforts had not been in vain. In the early part of 1939, a Georgia
carpenter, William Eberhart of Atlanta, brought two carved pieces of
soapstone to Brenau. He had found them, he said, in South Carolina, on a
hillside near Greenville. He had heard of the Dare stone, and he wanted to
know if these rocks, bearing unreadable inscriptions, might have some
connection to it. Pearce did not think so, since the South Carolina hill was
hundreds of miles from the Roanoke colony and equally far from the place
where Hammond reported making his find. But he agreed to examine the man's
stones, and he paid him a small sum of money. Before long, the man was
back, bringing more stones from the same site. These were dated 1591. Pearce
was intrigued and began an examination of the stones. On one of them, he
found the names of 17 Roanoke colonists, massacred in an attack by Indians,
along with a poignant plea: "God hab mercye." It was signed "Eleanor Dare."
This development was exciting, but it was also confusing and almost too
good to believe. Pearce investigated the carpenter; the man had only a
third-grade education and appeared to know nothing about Elizabethan
English. There was no evidence that he had ever known anybody who did.
Apparently, by sheer coincidence, he had stumbled onto the Lost Colony's
cemetery, hundreds of miles from where Pearce had expected to find it.
When Eberhart showed him the hillside, Pearce sought out the owners of the
land and paid $800 for it. His search for the remains of the colonists
yielded nothing, but eventually 13 stones were found there. Pearce surmised
that this was the site where the original Dare stone was carved; apparently
it had been carried back to the North Carolina coast in an attempt to
deliver it to John White. The new findings added many details to the grim
story of the Roanoke colonists, and on one of the stones was a sentence that
promised the possibility of further discoveries. It was a message from
Eleanor Dare: "Father wee goe sw." The land to the southwest was Georgia,
and that was where the next Dare stones appeared, in the latter part of
1939. An Atlanta handyman, I.A. Turner, who had read in the newspapers about
Pearce's research, came to the professor with carved rocks he said he had
picked up along the Chattahoochee River. Once again, Pearce found himself
deciphering messages from Eleanor Dare, urgent messages to a man who had
been dead for centuries. The surviving colonists had been aided by
friendly Indians, the carvings said, and lived in the "primaeval splendour"
of the Southern forests. But they longed to see England again. "Father,"
Eleanor Dare wrote, "God brynge you hither." Within a year, two other
Georgians, T.R. Jett and William Bruce, came forward with Dare stones. The
man who had taken Pearce to the South Carolina hillside also brought more
stones. These, he said, had been found near Atlanta. From the carvings on
these rocks, Pearce learned more about the later years of Eleanor Dare.
She had married an Indian "king" and had borne him a daughter. Apparently
abandoning hope of ever returning to her homeland, she continued to leave
messages for White in hopes that he might find her child. "Father I beseeche
you hab mye dowter goe to englande," read one of the carvings dated 1598.
The final stone that mentioned the name of Eleanor Dare was not her
handiwork. Dated 1599, it was signed by a colonist named Griffen Jones, and
it bore an unhappy message for White: "Eleanor dye february." Eleanor Dare
was definitely dead, but she and the Lost Colonists were attracting more
attention than they had in decades. Reporters and academics began showing up
at Brenau to view the collection of stones, and most went away impressed.
Replicas of some of the stones were featured in Georgia's exhibit at the New
York World's Fair in 1940. Mention of them began to creep into histories and
reference books. Pearce himself became something of a celebrity, lecturing
about the Dare stones, appearing on the radio and writing scholarly
articles. If the stones were proved genuine, he had made one of the greatest
historical discoveries of the century. But he refused to declare outright
that he believed in them. He would say only that if they were fraudulent, it
was a hoax "more fantastic than the story itself." The possibility of a
hoax seemed to face its toughest test in October 1940, when a committee of
distinguished scholars traveled to Gainesville to inspect the stones.
Leading this group was Samuel Eliot Morison of Harvard University. He was an
expert on the early exploration of the continent, and if there was a fraud,
he and his colleagues seemed sure to find it. The committee members looked
at the stones, met some of the Georgians who had brought them to light, and
traveled to a cave near the Chattahoochee, just north of Atlanta, where some
of the rocks were found. On the wall of the cave, they were shown an
inscription: "Eleanor Dare heyr sithence 1593." The committee quickly
issued a preliminary finding. "The preponderance of evidence," it declared,
"points to the authenticity of the stones commonly known as the Dare
stones." Even though couched in the cautious language of scholars, this
statement was a bombshell. The story stirred excitement around the country,
and Pearce became a Georgia hero. Reporters rushed to talk to him and to the
local men who had brought the stones to Brenau. Photographs of the stones
and of the cave now known as "Eleanor Dare's bedroom" covered the pages of
the Atlanta newspapers. Pearce, who previously had told the story of the
Dare stones in scholarly publications, now began seeking a wider audience.
He submitted an article about his findings to the Saturday Evening Post in
New York. The editors, after consulting with Morison at Harvard, decided to
buy the story. But first, they would send their own reporter to check out
this fantastic discovery. The man they sent was Boyden Sparkes, a
tough-minded writer who had covered the news for three decades on two
continents. The heyday of the hard-boiled detective story was 1940, and
Sparkes' account of his investigation reads like the adventures of Sam Spade
in Dixie. But he was a good newsman who took nothing on faith. Sparkes
decided to begin at the beginning, in North Carolina, where the colonists
had disappeared 350 years before. He found the people there highly skeptical
about the stones, and he went into Georgia looking for evidence of fraud.
Welcomed warmly by Pearce, he examined the stones at Brenau and went to all
the places where they had been unearthed. He talked to the men who claimed
to have found them and to scholars and skeptics in Georgia and around the
nation. The Saturday Evening Post published Sparkes' conclusions in April
1941. Despite the rather acid tone of his article, it was a masterpiece of
investigation and deduction. He pointed out anachronisms in the Elizabethan
English on some of the stones. He quoted geologists and stonemasons about
how easy it would be to "age" a carved rock. He stressed the improbability
of anyone's marking a trail by leaving stones hundreds of miles apart in a
16th-century wilderness. It was just too convenient, Sparkes suggested.
There were 48 stones, all carved within a few years of one another, all
lying unnoticed for centuries, and all suddenly discovered in rapid
succession. It was also an uncanny coincidence that Eberhart, the Georgia
carpenter, who had found stones first in South Carolina, later found others
within four miles of his own Atlanta home. The New York writer took a hard
look at the people in the case, first among them the mysterious L. E.
Hammond. Even Sparkes himself could not track down the Californian who
supposedly had found the first stone. As he noted, the experts knew less
about Hammond than they knew about Ananias Dare; and now the man was as hard
to find as the Lost Colonists themselves. The reporter also talked to the
Georgians who found stones, and he looked more closely than anyone else into
their backgrounds. He discovered that some of these men, whom Morison
described as "perfectly honest Georgia farmers," had been in trouble with
the law. But he also learned something more significant about these
discoverers, something that no professor apparently had realized. The four
men knew one another. All this was embarrassing enough to Georgians and to
Brenau, but Sparkes went further. He revealed that Pearce had paid money for
the stones, quite a lot of money for a Southern professor in hard economic
times. He wrote sarcastically of Pearce's desire for fame and revealed that
the professor had written to filmmaker Cecil B. De Mille, suggesting a movie
about the fate of the Lost Colonists. Sparkes also quoted Pearce about the
kind of man who would fake the Dare stones. Such a person, Pearce said,
would have to be "deranged, but brilliant, with great imagination and
tremendous creative ability." Sparkes, without making any direct
accusations, suggested that among all the suspects in the case, Pearce fit
this description best. The article was a blow to Brenau, which quickly
removed the stones from public exhibit, but it was especially painful to
Pearce. He briefly considered taking some legal action against the magazine,
but, within weeks, he was publicly accusing one of the men who had brought
him stones of committing fraud. The man, in turn, accused Pearce of being a
faker and then leveled the same charge at the entire Pearce family. The
professor told reporters sadly that the stones, which had seemed so
impressive a few months before, were now mostly "discredited." There was
some laughter around the country at the Dare stones fiasco, but in academic
circles no one was anxious to point fingers. Too many people had been
fooled, and the very success of the fraud worked against its being
remembered for long. It was Morison, the great historian, who offered a
proper assessment of the controversy, though he did so unintentionally. When
he and his committee first viewed the stones, he remarked that they were
either genuine or a "fantastic hoax." He had seen many historical frauds in
the past, he said, but the Dare stones "were not in the same class." Just
as England's war with Spain overshadowed the fate of the Roanoke colonists,
the news of World War II swept the Dare stones out of the public mind.
Within a few months after the publication of Sparkes' article, bombs fell on
Pearl Harbor. Pearce, a veteran of the First World War, enlisted again. He
eventually helped write a history of the Army Signal Corps. Pearce's
father, the president of Brenau, died in 1943, and control of the college
soon passed out of the family's hands. When Pearce returned from the war, he
chose not to return to Emory or Brenau, but became a professor at East
Michigan State University. He retired in 1963 and died in Florida in 1971.
Boyden Sparkes died on the North Carolina coast in 1954. He kept up a
correspondence over the years with members of the Emory faculty, discussing
his continuing efforts to track down L. E. Hammond. He never found him.
Morison of Harvard, who had once told the Saturday Evening Post, "I . . .
believe the stones to be genuine," remembered things differently years
later. He wrote in 1971 that he and his fellow scholars who visited Brenau
had "politely . . . declared the stones to be fakes." Morison died in 1976,
still one of the most respected men in his field. The stones are still at
Brenau, no longer in a place of honor, but not quite forgotten either. Every
few years, someone in the media hears about them and decides to visit. In
the late 1970s, the "In Search of . . ." television program ran a brief
segment about the stones, and now and then someone sees a rerun of the show
and calls the college. Jim Southerland, the Brenau professor who made a
brief appearance on the show, handles most of these inquiries, and he tries
not to encourage those people who have heard sensationalized accounts of the
stones. He refers them first to the Saturday Evening Post article and notes
that most of the points Sparkes made have never been refuted. Southerland
notes that many scholars, and not just a few in north Georgia, were fooled
by the Dare stones. He does not believe that Pearce himself, "a good,
respected historian," was ever party to any fraud. In Southerland's
opinion, Pearce made a mistake that every scholar must struggle to avoid:
"He lost his objectivity." The excitement of making a major discovery, and
perhaps of being famous, blinded him temporarily to the problems with the
Dare stones. Southerland, who has studied a number of historical hoaxes,
says this sort of thing is not unusual. Many of the greatest fakes of all
time were perpetrated by relatively uneducated people, who managed to
deceive learned, even brilliant, men. But why are the stones still at
Brenau? Perhaps at the beginning, keeping them was a matter of honor.
Throwing them out while Pearce was under a cloud might have seemed to be an
acknowledgment of wrongdoing. But all that is past now, and they remain for
a different reason. Whether 16th-century relics or 20th-century fakes, they
are a fascinating chapter in the history of Brenau, and in the history of
Georgia. Finally, there is always a slim chance that one of the stones is
not a fake. The original Dare stone, the one that Hammond brought out of
North Carolina, still sits in a glass case, ready to be displayed again if
some miracle proves it genuine. After 50 years, Hammond is still an
enigma. Nobody knows who he really was or what became of him after he left
Georgia. His visits to the state remain a mystery, too; no one saw how he
traveled, no one could learn where he stayed, and he left behind only
memories, a signature on a document at Emory and the original Dare stone.
Southerland, who told a TV interviewer a few years ago that the later stones
are certainly fraudulent, added that there was a "50-50 chance" the Hammond
stone was real. "Maybe I was a little generous," he says now. But unless
Hammond is found someday, there will remain a faint but tempting possibility
that the cr oss on that piece of quartz was carved "in distresse," and that
the message is really from Eleanor Dare. The message itself is almost
mocking after four centuries. Or is it only half a century? "Anye Englishman
shew John White," it says. But it is much too late to show John White. In
1938, when it appeared that Pearce really had discovered the fate of the
Roanoke colonists, a North Carolina newspaper spoke out in protest. "Don't
rob us of our Lost Colony legends," an editorial writer pleaded. The writer
need not have worried. The episode of the Dare stones did not rip away the
glamour and mystery from the story of the Lost Colony; it simply added a few
more tantalizing layers.
Copyright © 2002 The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution
--
Stephen Horrillo
> > al awayE wEE blEEvE /Y\T noTT /Y\ov SoonE afTEr
> all away. We believed that not; though soon after,
Some people have translate this as "we believe it wasn't you." i.e. not one
of White's ship. White's records show that it was his ship returning to
rescue them.
--
All the best,
Ste...@stephenhorrillo.com
"Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more"- (Act III, Scene
II).
See the Dare Stone at: http://www.angelfire.com/ego/iammagi/DARE_INDEX.htm
--
All the best,
Ste...@stephenhorrillo.com
"Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more"- (Act III, Scene
II).
See the Dare Stone at: http://www.angelfire.com/ego/iammagi/DARE_INDEX.htm