Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey there, and welcome to short stuff. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles to Beach Briant, and there's Jerry Jerome wrong
and over there. Yeah. The only reason need to stop
that notice because you saw me draw it to a
close like a conductor. I know you conduct me. That's
a T shirt. So this is a follow up everyone.
(00:27):
We do these occasionally. About five this years ago, five
and a half fish, five and a half ish we
did have In three quarters we did a full length
episode on the Roanoke Colony, The Creepy Spooky Crow Ato
and Mystery of Roanoak so good, and in it we
spent just a few minutes talking about the dare Stones.
(00:50):
But when I went back and listened to it again,
we didn't go into nearly enough detail. And so we're
gonna do that right now. We are, so just to
kind of bring you guys back up to date real quick.
And it still is as a matter of fact, of
North Carolina near the North Carolina Virginia border. It was
the first attempt, I believe in in English colony. There
(01:11):
was a first wave in fiftive that didn't work out,
and then a second wave. Maybe it was even the
third wave technically came along in July seven, and this
ship carried ninety men, seventeen women, and eleven children. And
it was led by a guy named John White who
was named the governor of the I guess Roanoke Colony,
(01:32):
and he had his daughter, Eleanor Dare with him. She
was married to uh Anna I a Stare. I think
that's how you say that great sixteenth century name. It
sure is and Anna and I as I just want
to say that all the time. And Eleanor had a baby,
the first English born or English baby born in America,
(01:53):
whose name was Virginia Dare. Now do you know if
they did it in America? Was the conceived in America
or just born in America? I don't know. I don't know. Actually,
I'm kind of I'm just kind of curious. It doesn't
really matter, because what really matters is this was the
first English baby born in the New World. And it
(02:15):
was a very big deal for little baby Virginia to
come along. It was so um. In short order, Virginia's grandfather,
John White, the head of the colony, says, hey, guys,
I'm kind of bored. I'm gonna go back to England.
And I'll get some supplies. I'll be back within a year.
You guys sit tight, just keep building this colony up,
and uh, it'll be all good b RB. Right. But
(02:38):
he did not b RB. He beat a long time
from coming back, right, And about three years worth comes
back and no one's there. His daughter's gone, his grand
little Virginia's gone. Everybody's gone. Um, the buildings are dismantled.
And as you learned in that episode, the word crow
(02:58):
at Owen was carved and that was in a I
guess it was a tree, right, Yeah, they carved into
a tree, and crow Tone was the name of a
friendly nearby tribe that the English had been in contact with.
That's right. So, uh, what was not there was across
and White said, hey, listen, if there's you know, some
(03:18):
bad stuff going on, and you guys have to split
like just to take some time to carve across into
a tree, so I'll know that bad stuff happened. That
cross was not there. So there's always been a big
mystery about what crow a Tone was all about why
there was no cross and what happened to the hundred
and eighteen settlers, Like that was it? There was that
was the that was the sum total of the evidence,
(03:41):
and John White asked around a little bit, didn't try
all that hard to find him actually for it being
the you know, his daughter, his son in law and
his granddaughter and the first American, right exactly, first English American. Sure, um,
you want to get us killed? Uh? And uh so
he he goes back to England and the mystery just
sets in. When Jamestown settlers come along, they ask around,
(04:04):
they hear, they hear rumors of um tribes that are
made up of like light skinned people who speak English
and live in two story thatched roof houses. Um. But
none of it is ever confirmed. There's no evidence whatsoever
what happened to these lost colonists at Roanoke. And that's
the way it was for three d and fifty is
years until uh the summer of nine seven, when a
(04:29):
guy from California named L. E. Hammond, which, as i've
I've found, um is not to be confused with Lah
Hammond Inferno, which is a synth band that I came
across today accidentally, I kind of they're pretty good. Um.
His name was actually Lewis Hammond, but he was a
produced dealer from California, and he showed up at Emory
(04:51):
University and said, Hey, I'm on vacation in North Carolina
with my wife looking for hickory nuts as you do.
And I found this weird stone. What do you guys
make of this thing? Yeah, so Emory's right here in Atlanta.
And it was inscribed and with a message, and he said,
can you guys tell me what this says? And I'm
gonna read it right now in full. This is the
(05:12):
sort of you know, modernized version, because it was it's
sort of like reading Jeffrey Chaucer or something, so it
has to get translated. So here's what it said. Father.
Soon after you go for England, we came here only
misery and war for two years above half dead. These
(05:33):
two years more from sickness. Being twenty four, a savage
with a message of a ship came to us. Within
a small space of time, they became frightened of revenge
and ran all away. We believe it was not you.
Soon after the savages said spirits were angry, suddenly they
murdered all save seven. That means all but seven. My
(05:55):
child and annon I as two were slain with much misery.
Is there any other way that peace Lane is my question?
Buried all near four miles east of this river, upon
a small hill, names were written all there on a rock.
Put this there. Also, if a savage shows this to you,
we promised you would give them great plenty presents. Right,
(06:19):
So there you have it. Yeah, And it was E. W. D.
Eleanor White Dare that's what you would think. Yeah, And
so the Emery professors are like, where did you get this?
You may have just solved like a three hundred and
fifty year old mystery. And Lewis Hammond was like, somewhere
about fifty miles inland. They went, what did you just say?
(06:42):
He said, I don't know, about fifty miles from Roanoke
Island And they said, well, you know, John White, the governor,
famously reckoned that the Roanoke colonists had moved fifty miles
into the main So that would definitely coincide with that idea. Um.
So they went back to this area where um Lewis
Hammond found this rock and they could not find the spot.
(07:03):
He couldn't find the spot where he originally found it
to show them, but he left it with them. I
think sold it to him. I think is more accurate,
and then went back to California and was scarcely heard
from again. That's right. So we're gonna take a break.
We're gonna come back and tell you, as Paul Harvey
would say, the rest of the story as sk So
(07:42):
here's the deal with that original stone. Um, it depends
on who you talk to. Some people say it was authentic.
Some people still say it's authentic and may have solved
the mystery. Some people say no, it was not. We'll
talk a little bit more about that in a second.
But what happened was the whole country started talking. Uh.
That was a professor at Emory name Heywood J. Pierce Jr.
(08:04):
Who published that paper, published a paper so talking all
about the stone in the Journal of Southern History in
ninety eight. He had his father, Heywood J. Pierce, dad,
and he owned. Daddy owned a college, Burnell University, which
is in Gainesville, Georgias. Now it was Burnell University. Now
I think down now just the fever that's properly, it's
(08:27):
probably out of shirt somewhere. So they started to have
suspicions because, like you said, when they went back, they
couldn't really find exactly where he found it. They got
a I guess a private investigator or somebody in California
to look into this Hammond guy, and they really couldn't
find much to corroborate a story or even who he
said he was, other than his name and address. I
(08:49):
saw an internet sleuth explained it by saying, you know what,
this guy was married before in a census, Um, he
has two children and seven they were still underage, so um,
he may have been laying low and keeping away from
publicity so he wouldn't pay child support. Interesting. I thought
(09:11):
that was a clever, interesting explanation for it, because what
I found was there was nothing to indicate that this
guy was actually a fraud, just that they couldn't really
follow up with them very easily. Yeah, but at the
very least Pierce and Pierce were uh, still very intrigued
by this original stone and said, uh, here's a reward
offered for any additional stones that pop up five bucks.
(09:34):
And all of a sudden people are like, oh, I
got some stones, you want some, you want five? You
wanna give me five dollars, I'll show you some Deir stones. Uh.
Specifically a man named Bill Eberhardt who was an artist.
He was a stone cutter from Fulton County right here
in Atlanta, and he was paid two thousand dollars for
forty two forgeries that he turned over as de Air stones.
(09:56):
And it's not like they they said, hey, thanks for
these forgeries, here's some money. They thought they were they
were real at the time. But um on the stones,
the series of stones, it basically tracks Eleanor. It's like
Eleanor's little break breadcrumb diary that goes all the way
down to Georgia, almost to Atlanta, and along the way
she marries a chief from the Cherokee tribe, has another
(10:19):
daughter named agnes Um you know, uh possibly like becomes
romantically entangled with Tom Hanks over email for a little while,
and then ends up dying in a cave in Georgia.
I just love the idea of this stone cutter, like
inventing the storyline, you know, right, He's like, this is
the life I wish I had had. You know, you
(10:41):
could have been a screenwriter, Bill Everhard. I wonder, who
if he's got to have family here still, this is
just like the late thirties in Fulton County. Man, I
hope somebody's listening. They're like stop talking about my uncle
Bill like this. I think it's great. I guess all right,
(11:01):
so this is uh the flash ward In April, the
Saturday Evening Post said, you know what, these Norman Rockwell
covers are great, but what we really want to do
is run an expose on these Dare Stones and basically
shut it down as a complete forgery. Yeah. They they
did some real leg work to just totally undermine the
(11:21):
Daar Stones, which really kind of goes to to point
out how much the Dare Stones had totally captured the
imagination of the entire country. Um, this was a big, big,
widely publicized deal, and Saturday Evening Post came along and said, no,
look at this crack in this crack in this crack,
and basically, by the end of the article had just
completely revealed the whole thing as a hoax. And definitely
(11:44):
everything after that first one that Lewis Hammond found is
most decidedly at hoax at best. The Lewis Hammond stone is,
like you were saying, up for debate. But the Saturday
Evening Post said, no, there's anachronistic language in there. Things
like reconnoiter would not have been used. Um, there's a
problem with the fact that they used Arabic numerals um,
(12:08):
which didn't come into into use until later on. It's
weird that she made like vs instead of use, which
is kind of like Roman lettering a little bit. Um.
And at the time when the Saturday Evening Post dropped
this article, I was like, oh, well, that's it. It's
a total, total fraud and a total hoax. But as
the years kind of went by and bright Now University
(12:30):
suffered a tremendous public relations crisis as a result of this.
A lot of people looked really bad for verifying these
stones is authentic and then just being totally undermined by
the Saturday Evening Post br Now and and um, everyone
related to the stones almost literally buried them away in
a basement and then later on in an attic and
br now and tried to forget about it as much
(12:51):
as possible. Yeah, Pierce and Pierce had egg on their
face and that was no good. But people today say
again that it's possible that first one might be like,
for real, Um, it's different rock than these other ones.
It's this white, really bright white quartzite interior and has
a dark exterior, so it would have been something really good,
(13:12):
like almost like a chalkboard for her to use, So
that sort of makes sense. And um, it doesn't have
this anachronistic language that those other stones do. Uh. The
sign off is a little weird with E W D
because that's probably not what she would have done in
the sixteenth century. Other people say, no, no, no, it's
still that Chowen riverstone is a phony. And what they're
(13:33):
hoping is is that modern techniques can uh kind of
test this thing out at some point and see if
it's in fact legit. Yeah, because it's basically been cleared
by a lot of the humanities. People like there's an
expert in medieval graffiti, um who said this actually checks
out pretty well. Here's an example of somebody using Arabic numerals,
(13:54):
here's an example of somebody signing their name in this
kind of UM kind of abbreviation UM. So a lot
of it's been explained away. And the fact that it
is white quartzite, that when she carved it, like you said,
it would have been like a chalkboard. That would be
a terrible stone for a forger to choose, because you
would have to go to tremendous amounts of trouble to
(14:17):
to to fake it. Basically you just choose a different stone. Um.
So the fact that that it would have been really
hard to forge and they tried at the time of
the Saturday Evening Post article to forge it three different
ways and nobody could do it, um really lends a
lot of credence to it. Keeps hope alive that this
first stone, the original stone, is actually real. Right, so
(14:41):
maybe we'll find out one day, is our technology advance
is what happened to the original callings at roh Noke,
or that this stone says exactly how it happened. So alright, Chuck,
you got anything else? Nothing else? Well, that is it
for short stuff everybody. Oh wait, Jerry, you got anything else? Okay,
Well that's it for short stuff everybody. Uh. You can
(15:02):
read a really great article on the dre Stones on
how stuff Works, and you can listen to our original
row Noke episode two at Stuff you Should Know dot
com and uh, in the meantime, we'll see you next
time short stuff out. Stuff you Should Know is a
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(15:23):
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