Roanoke’s Lost Colony

The story of Virginia Dare

Over thirty years ahead of the Pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth Rock, 117 exhausted men, women and children came ashore on Roanoke Island in July 1587. There, they entered history by founding the first attempted settlement of its kind in the Americas.

Sir Walter Raleigh had recruited the settlers. The group included John White; his pregnant daughter, Eleanor Dare; her husband, Ananias Dare; and the Indian chief Manteo, who had formed an alliance with the English during an earlier stay in Britain.

After landing, they brought their possessions and provisions ashore and restored an older fort that had already been built on the island. On August 18, 1587, Eleanor Dare delivered a daughter and named her Virginia, giving the child the distinction of being the first English child born on American soil. Ten days later, John White sailed back to England with a pledge to return carrying additional supplies. He would never see his family again.

Three years later, John White reached Roanoke Island once more, arriving on his granddaughter’s third birthday. Instead of the settlement he had left behind, he found an abandoned, ransacked site choked by overgrown brush. One palisade bore the carved word CROATOAN, while the letters CRO had been cut into a nearby tree. White understood the carving to mean that the colonists had gone inland to Croatoan, the home of Chief Manteo’s people south of Roanoke in the Outer Banks on what is now Hatteras Island.

Before White could investigate further, a powerful hurricane struck, damaging his ships and compelling him to return to England. Although he tried repeatedly, he never succeeded in gathering the money and resources needed to cross again to America. Raleigh had abandoned hope for the settlement, and White died years later on one of Raleigh’s estates without ever learning what happened to his family or to the colony. The 117 pioneers of Roanoke Island disappeared into wilderness and legend. Their shared fate remains the subject of many theories and controversies, and their story is performed each summer in The Lost Colony, the nations longest symphonic drama.