437 years ago today, on August 18, 1587, Virginia Dare was born on Roanoke Island—the first English child born in the New World.
Beyond that simple fact, almost nothing is known for certain about Virginia’s life. Later that year, her grandfather, John White, left Roanoke Island to return to England for more supplies, but because of war with Spain, he was unable to return until three years later.
By that time, the colonists on Roanoke were long gone. The only clue to their whereabouts was a single word carved onto a stake in the colony’s palisade: “CROATOAN”.
Much has been made over the disappearance of Virginia Dare and the other residents of the “Lost Colony”. It has often been framed as an enduring mystery—but it didn’t have to be that way.
To John White, the meaning of the word “Croatoan” was abundantly clear. It was the name of the principal town of the nearby Native American tribe, some sixty miles south (near where the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse stands today). Though he never had the opportunity to travel there and confirm that his family was alive, as he wrote in his account of the journey, “I greatly joyed that I had safely found a certaine token of their safe being at Croatoan, which is the place where Manteo was borne”.
But that wasn’t the impression the world got—largely because people have always had something to gain by leaving the mystery of the Lost Colony as, well, a mystery. Doubt about what had happened to the colonists meant that Sir Walter Raleigh, who had funded the Roanoke colony, didn’t have to give up his claim on that land, and so rather than confirming what had happened, he spent his time in the New World looking for gold instead. By the time serious efforts were made to locate the colonists, a generation had gone by.
And so the truth was never uncovered, serious efforts gave way to idle speculation, and the story of the Lost Colony became more myth than history. The world will never really know what happened to Virginia Dare.
Believe it or not, there’s a lesson here for us, too: when our people need us, we can’t let political convenience stop us from taking action. We have to be bold, we have to be willing to make sacrifices at times, and we can’t ever shrug our shoulders and abandon our people to their fate.
That’s why I’m running for office—to fight for our people and to make sure that none of North Carolina’s communities is ever abandoned. The days of going overseas for a few years and coming back to find empty houses may be long gone, but when we don’t invest in our people, we’re leaving them behind all the same. No more.
I hope you’ll stand with me in that fight. We can use all the help we can get.
