Forty-eight inscribed stones, each claiming to carry a message from the colonists, reached Haywood J. Pearce Jr., a history professor at Emory University in Atlanta and vice-president of Brenau College in Gainesville, Georgia, of which his father was president, between November 1937 and January 1941. Forty-seven came from William Eberhardt, a Georgia stonecutter, and his associates in Georgia and South Carolina and were exposed as forgeries in 1941. The first stone stands apart: different rock (vein quartz, 21 lb 4 oz, 13 5/8 by 9 5/8 by 2 1/4 inches), a different region (said to be found near the Chowan River, a few miles from Edenton), a different and better hand, and none of the words that exposed the other forty-seven as forgeries. It is at Brenau University, Gainesville, Georgia. This section judges it on its own. The notes published with this report mark each quotation as read in the source or as taken from a reprint.
Pearce's reading of 1938 is the primary published text (Journal of Southern History 4, May 1938, pp. 148 to 163). He notes that every o and a on the back is "an irregular, roughly circular depression" and so conjectural, and that the long s (the old form of s, shaped like an f) is used throughout. The face, below a Latin cross:
The back, in Pearce's seventeen numbered lines (his bars mark his conjectural sentence divisions):
The 1941 reprint of Pearce's manuscript by the journalist Boyden Sparkes, whose investigation is described below, differs at line 6 only ("mesage of shipp vnto vs"). Popular texts since 2015 silently modernise: they print "Suddaine" for the stone's "suddiane", "Spirits" for "spirts", and "You" for "yov". The Brenau photographs show a face cut in capitals with some minuscule forms (VNTO with a V, Arabic numerals, I for J in "Iohn") and a back cut in small crowded letters. No transcription made letter by letter from the stone itself, as a specialist in inscriptions would make one, has ever been published.
Pearce's article withheld the finder's name. Sparkes (Saturday Evening Post, 26 April 1941) supplied it from Pearce's own manuscript: L. E. Hammond, described as a produce dealer of Alameda, California, touring for hickory nuts, who said he found the stone in a swamp about three miles from Edenton on the east bank of the Chowan, washed it, cleaned the grooves with a steel brush and darkened the letters with an indelible pencil, and brought it to Emory University in November 1937. The Emory party that went to the site could not find the spot; Hammond produced "a crude map scrawled on a piece of paper bag". Emory's president called the stone a fraud. Nobody who dealt with him ever saw his car or his wife. Detectives of the Pinkerton agency "were unable to find anyone who had ever known him". His only reference was an Oakland jeweller who knew him as married, about forty, with "some kind of a pension". He proposed exhibiting the stone at twenty-five cents a head, sold it to the Pearces for $1,000 paid to a post-office box, and later reappeared in Georgia under the name "L. E. Martin", offering a later finder $30,000 for a stone with "Yahoo" on it and telling Pearce he could procure "a stone bearing any word Pearce asked for". In the eighty-nine years since, no researcher has produced a documented life for him. Brandon Fullam, an independent researcher (2021), claims to, in a book that could not be obtained for this report.
The Lost Colony, an outdoor play by the North Carolina playwright Paul Green, opened at Manteo, the town on Roanoke Island, on 4 July 1937. President Roosevelt attended on 18 August 1937, the 350th birthday of Virginia Dare, the day a commemorative stamp was issued. Hammond dated his find to mid-September (Pearce's manuscript) or August (according to David La Vere, a historian at the University of North Carolina Wilmington whose book on the stones appeared in 2010). Sparkes also recorded two things from that summer at Manteo: a stranger who tried to sell "a stone relic of Virginia Dare" from a suitcase, and a highway promoter who years earlier had proposed "a scheme for creating a bogus stone relic of the Lost Colony to get newspaper headlines" and who was in the audience on opening night. Whether the suitcase stone was Hammond's stone is unproven. Pearce never investigated it.
Seventeen months after Hammond, Eberhardt began delivering stones that continued the story into Georgia. The first stone had said "murther al save seaven" of twenty-four and "names writ al ther onrocke"; Eberhardt's fourth stone carried seventeen names and the date 1591. A committee of thirty-four scholars led by the Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison met at Brenau on 19 and 20 October 1940 and reported that "the preponderance of evidence points to the authenticity of the stones". Sparkes then showed that Eberhardt's stones were freshly cut soft rock, that they used "primeval", "reconnoitre" and "trale" (a century or more too early), that their spelling was too consistent for any Elizabethan, and that one carried the letters F A K E. In May 1941 Eberhardt produced a stone reading "Pearce and Dare Historical Hoaxes. We Dare Anything." Every one of those findings concerns the later stones. What Sparkes established about the first stone was narrower: the finder could not be traced, the grooves had been scrubbed and pencilled, the Manteo suitcase episode, and the falsity of Pearce's claim that the inscription could not be duplicated (stone workmen at Marietta, Georgia, said they could cut it with hand tools; the Emory geologist had sandblasted an inscription into quartz himself).
An examination in 1983 by Robert Stephenson, South Carolina's state archaeologist, was inconclusive. La Vere (2009, 2010) reopened the case for authenticity. In 2016 Brenau's president Ed Schrader, a geologist, had a slice cut from the stone at UNC Asheville: the interior is bright white, the exterior and the groove surfaces dark. Lawler (2018) collected opinions: Heather Wolfe, curator of manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, saw nothing that "jumps out as a forgery" but doubted the three-initial signature; Jean Wilson of Cambridge, a historian of inscriptions, found nothing that could not be of the date; Matthew Champion, a historian of English church graffiti, found the lettering consistent with English church graffiti but could find no other instance of Virginia abbreviated "Via"; Diarmaid MacCulloch, the Oxford historian of the Reformation, called it a forgery with "all the plausibility of Dick Van Dyke's cockney accent". No laboratory report on the 2016 slice has been published, no weathering measurement exists, and the language panel Brenau announced for autumn 2018 has no published outcome. No test, report or excavation on the stone between 2019 and September 2026 could be found.
About 3.7 MB of period text (Hakluyt vol. VIII in the MacLehose edition, Strachey in Major's 1849 edition, Smith's works in Arber's 1884 edition with u and v preserved, and the 1608 True Relation) was searched for every unusual form on the stone. Absence from these texts is weak evidence, because the full Early English Books Online corpus could not be searched; presence in them is strong evidence.
| Form on the stone | Finding |
|---|---|
| salvage, warre, murther, seaven, myles, plentie, shew, hence, hither, suddaine (as the popular texts print it) | Common period forms. "Salvages" is White's own word in 1590. La Vere's claim that "salvage" was current for only a few years is wrong. |
| sickenes, awaye, faine (feign), alsoe, Englande, tow, cam, deade, nott, onlie, greate, putt, rann, angrie | Attested, some rarely. "Faine" for feign is in Smith's Generall Historie. |
| "goe for Englande"; "went hence unto heaven"; "yt" for it; "salvages" | Source-exact: White 1587 has "goe for England"; Smith 1624 has "went hence to heauen"; "yt" is Strachey's habit. This is consistent with a genuine text, and equally with a writer who had read these books. |
| bleeve, misarie, beine, spirts, anye, affrite, suddiane, easte, mesage, "to slaine" | Unattested. Pearce himself found no precedent for five of them. They cluster in the add-an-e and drop-a-letter type. |
| yov (four times, on the back) | Against the written convention of v initial and u medial or final (Smith: "you" 955 times, "yov" never). On a carved face V for U is normal, and the back's small letters are read from a scrubbed and floured surface, so this is weak evidence against the stone. |
| mine childe | In all four corpora the determiner "mine" precedes only vowels and h (Hakluyt 20 cases; Smith 16) and "my" precedes consonants (223; 862). This is an archaism of the kind used on the stage. |
| Via for Virginia; EWD | No period parallel for either (Champion 2018; Pearce 1938, Wolfe 2018 and MacCulloch 2018 on the three initials). |
Nothing on the first stone is a proven anachronism of the "reconnoitre" kind. The linguistic case against it is a case from register and convention. The content is also entirely inside the printed record: the fifty-mile move, a ship that came and went, Indian fear of revenge, priests inciting a massacre, seven survivors. All of it is in Hakluyt, Strachey, Smith and the 1609 instructions, the books Pearce used to check it, and nothing on the stone is checkable outside them. The burial hill, the rock with names and the grave have never been found; test pits at the most plausible site in 2015 turned up English pottery of a later century and nothing of the sixteenth.
The first Dare Stone is more likely than not a fabrication of 1937: about 80 in 100 (range 75 to 85). The weight lies, in order, on the finder's conduct and untraceability; on the anniversary season and the documented intent that summer to manufacture such a relic; on a text every statement of which can be found in the printed sources, and whose archaic spellings are of the kinds an imitator would choose; and on physical evidence that cannot be used either way, because the grooves were scrubbed, pencilled, floured and pressure-washed before anyone could test them. Against this stand the absence of any demonstrated anachronism, which is a real difference from the forty-seven fakes, and the unmeasured colour contrast of the 2016 slice. The Foundation's 2023 volume (Klingelhofer, ed., ch. 1) adds an argument from chronology: White reached Croatoan on 18 August 1590 "and not a year later", which "was unknown in 1937", and the carver, "Not knowing that the long-held 1591 date was wrong", dated the stone to the year he believed White had returned. This report has not been able to confirm that 1591 was the received date for White's return in the 1930s, so the argument is recorded here and given no weight. The stone does not bear on the colonists' fate. If genuine, it places seven survivors of a massacre near the Chowan in 1591; if a forgery, its writer had read the same sources used here.
What would settle it: scanning-electron imaging and residue analysis of the few incisions that escaped cleaning (identified in 2011 by Johannes Loubser, a rock-art specialist who examined the stones), where a modern alloy or an abrasive signature would be decisive; a quantified weathering comparison of an uncleaned groove floor, the natural exterior and the 2016 saw cut against local vein-quartz controls, the only test that could positively support authenticity; a search for the suspect forms in Early English Books Online; and the Emory "Dare stones collection, 1937 to 1987", which should hold Hammond's letters and the Pinkerton report.