The Dare Stones
Stones inscribed with messages from the Lost Colony of Roanoke, found across the South in the late 1930s. A reward offer produced forty-seven forgeries. The one that came first, before any reward existed, is still argued over.
Why this verdict
Unresolved on one stone out of forty-eight. Forty-seven were traced to a Georgia stonecutter responding to a reward and are discredited; the first, reported in 1937 near the Chowan River, is stylistically and geologically unlike the others and has never been shown to be either genuine or fake. Brenau University, which holds it, says so on its own catalogue.
- Period
- Region
- Reading time
- Sources
01The claim
That inscribed stones found in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia carry messages written by Eleanor Dare, daughter of Governor John White, recording the migration and deaths of the Roanoke colonists between 1587 and 1603 — and so resolve the disappearance that has been unexplained since White returned in 1590 to an empty settlement and the word CROATOAN cut into a post.
02Where it came from
In November 1937 a man named Louis E. Hammond brought a stone to Emory University, saying he had found it near the Chowan River in North Carolina. Its inscription described the deaths of most of the colonists and directed the reader to another stone marking a grave. Haywood Pearce Jr. of Brenau College took up the investigation and his family offered a reward for further stones. Forty-seven arrived. Nearly all were produced by or through Bill Eberhardt, a Georgia stonecutter, and they came with a narrative that carried the colonists conveniently into the hills near Brenau's own campus.
03What the record shows
? UNRESOLVED — A real open question. Credible sources disagree.
The forty-seven are settled. Boyden Sparkes' investigation for the Saturday Evening Post in 1941 demonstrated the pattern — the stones appeared in response to money, in a lettering style unlike the first, with an internal chronology that unravelled under inspection — and Eberhardt was subsequently caught producing more. Scholars and the press dismissed the whole collection, and the reputational damage was so complete that the first stone went down with the rest.
The first stone is a different object and has different problems. It was reported before any reward was offered, by a man with no evident stake who declined to profit from it and then disappeared from the record. Its lettering, its stone and its Elizabethan orthography are unlike the Eberhardt stones. It has never been subjected to a test that settles the question: weathering analysis on quartzite is not diagnostic at this timescale, and there is no controlled excavation context because there was no excavation.
Brenau University, which holds the collection, reopened the question in 2016 under its president, the geologist Ed Schrader, commissioning new examination and publishing the results as inconclusive. The university's own catalogue records the first stone as neither proven nor disproven, which is an unusual and creditable position for an institution holding a disputed artefact.
Historians of the Lost Colony are divided in a way that is worth stating precisely: the majority working assumption is that the first stone is probably part of the same fraud, on the reasonable ground that it initiated it; the minority position is that a hoaxer who produced that stone and then walked away from the money makes no sense. Neither side has evidence that closes it.
04What it cost
This entry is here to mark a boundary. Forty-seven of these stones are exactly what the archive's DEBUNKED entries are made of — a reward, a stonecutter, a story that flatters the people paying for it. The forty-eighth is the case the archive's rubric is built to preserve: a claim that is unsupported, quite possibly false, and nevertheless genuinely open, held by an institution that says so rather than resolving it in whichever direction is more comfortable.