History News: 430-Year-Old Mystery Of The Lost Colony Of Roanoke Finally Solved
Brenau UniversityThis stone’s inscription may hold a message from the Lost Colony of Roanoke.
A 21-pound engraved stone could perhaps solve the mystery behind the “Lost Colony” of Roanoke which has puzzled historians for centuries.
In 1590, the settlement of Roanoke had been completely deserted. The only clue as to what had happened was a fence post with the word “Croatoan,” the name of a neighboring Native American tribe, carved into it.
No clues arose until 1937, when a tourist from California walked into the history department at Atlanta’s Emory University with a massive stone carved with writing.
Ed Schrader, a geologist and president of Brenau University in Georgia, and other scholars now think this stone might be the most important artifact of the early American period.
When a team of Emory scholars deciphered the message scrawled across the stone they were shocked to discover the story that it told, which was one of two years of suffering due to sickness and war with local Native Americans that led to the death of virtually all of the colony’s settlers, including the stone writer’s husband and child.
Brenau University/National GeographicEd Schrader holds one of the stones.
The Emory team in 1937 initially declared that the stone was authentic. However, within the next few years, a Georgia stonecutter found more than three dozen stones also claiming to have been written by that same writer and which were also soon deemed authentic.
Then, in 1941, the Saturday Evening Post ran a devastating 11,000-word exposé debunking the legitimacy of all the stones as a hoax and damning the Georgia stonecutter to be a fraud thanks to various evidence.
But then, in 2016, Ed Schrader decided to take the original stone found in 1937 to the University of North Carolina for analysis. Schrader wants to fund an “exhaustive, geochemical investigation” that should go beyond the analysis described above and perhaps prove once and for all whether the stone is legitimate.
Researchers plan to more thoroughly analyze the language inscribed on the stone in order to verify its authenticity, and hopefully finally crack this mystery case wide open.
