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September
2011
The Community of Pelzer Historical Society (CPHS) has
graciously allowed us to reprint an article that appeared on their
website in January of 2010. Please
take a few minutes to visit their website at www.historicpelzer.org
and if you'd like more information about that area of South Carolina,
contact Beth at beth@historicpelzer.org.
THE LOST COLONY AND HISTORIC PELZER, SC
Late in the
afternoon of August 15, 1591, two small ships sailed into the bay at
Hatorask (Hatteras)and dropped anchor some three leagues from the shore.
As twilight fell one of the voyagers paced the deck restlessly from
stern to stern. The voyager was John White, Governor of Sir Walter
Raleigh's Roanoke colony, who was finally returning to the little band
of English settlers, among them his own daughter, whom he had left
nearly four years before to return to England for supplies. Upon first
coming to anchor in the place where the Colony were left in 1587, John
and the others saw .."..a great smoke..". This had them in
high hopes that all was well and that the colonists were in John's
words.."...there expecting my return out of England." John
found no sign of the colonists at the site. An agreement had been
established between John's group and the colonists in which in the event
that the colonists were to run into any trouble, they would
.."carve over the letters or name a Cross in this form (a Maltese
cross with arms of equal length..) There were no such signs of distress.
After exploring at least two signs of smoke, which led to no positive
result, John White and his group closely observed at the site
"...in all this way we saw in the sand the print of the Savages'
feet of 2 or 3 sorts...and as we entered up the sandy bank, upon a tree,
in the very brow thereof, were curiously carved these fair Roman letters
CRO: which letters presently we knew to signify the place where I should
find the planters seated, according to a secret token agreed upon
between them and me at my last departure from them; which was, that in
any ways they should not fail to write or carve on the trees or posts of
the doors the name of the place where they should be seated; for at my
coming away they were prepared to remove from Roanoak 50 miles into the
main." White was disturbed to find that the houses had been taken
down and in their place built a "..high palisade much like a
fort...". After closer inspection, White found "..one of the
chief trees or posts at the right side of the entrance had the bark
taken off, and five foot from the ground in fair Capital letters was
graven CROATOAN without any cross or sign of distress.." There were
a few items found and the area was nearly overgrown with grass and
weeds. John White and his men ended up sailing back to England and any
other search was abandoned. Thus, the Roanoke Colony became the famous
"Lost Colony" in American history. It should be remembered
that this colony included the first child born of English parents in the
new world, Virginia Dare, daughter of Eleanor, herself the daughter of
John White, and Ananias Dare.
One day, in
1937, a tourist found a stone with what appeared to be Elizabethan
English words on the banks of the Chowan River near Edenton, North
Carolina. Eventually this stone found its way to the desk of a professor
at Emory University, by the name of Haywood J. Pearce Jr., an authority
on fourteenth to seventeenth century English writing. He aroused the
interest of his father, Dr. H J Pearce Sr. , then President of Brenau
College in Gainesville, GA. Then, in 1939, a "Bill" Eberhart,
of Fulton County, GA was traveling by automobile through the upcountry
of South Carolina. He pulled over to take a nap in his car and realized
that he had a flat tire. He used a stone that he picked up in a clay
ravine to help raise his car from the ground. He noticed the stone had
writing on it. He was curious and went back to the ravine and found
twelve more similar stones. The site of Eberhart's discovery was a
hillside on the Greenville County side of the Saluda River some twelve
miles below Greenville just outside the town of Pelzer on Hwy 20. The
story told from these stones is indeed amazing as it tells of a 350 mile
trek begun by one hundred and seventeen settlers of the Roanoke Colony
to the southwest through North Carolina into South Carolina. By
the time they arrived near the hillside by the Saluda River, their
number had diminished to twenty four. At this place, the band was
attacked by savages, resulting in seventeen additional persons killed,
including Ananias and Virginia Dare. The seventeen were then buried on
that hillside.
After
discovery of the "Pelzer stones", the Drs. Pearce believed
that the Edenton stone was originally inscribed on the hill in Pelzer
and then sent by an Indian runner to be placed on Roanoke Island for the
purpose of informing John White or others of what had become of the
colony. They thought that perhaps the Indian runner had either died or
was killed near Edenton, hence, the stone found in that particular
location. The hill property is said to have been sold to the Pearce
gentlemen and that after a search of the ravine they concluded that the
stones had probably not been originally placed there by the colonists,
but simply thrown there by workmen later clearing the fields. On October
21, 1940, the two Drs. Pearce invited a select committee to discuss the
"Pelzer stones" or "Dare stones". They chose Samuel
Eliot Morrison, then of Harvard and President of the American
Antiquarian Society to head the committee. After much discussion, they
concluded that..."The preponderance of evidence points to the
authenticity of the stones commonly known as the Dare stones."
It is said
that WWII precluded further study of the stones and that Dr. Pearce Sr.
died in 1943. Additionally, his heirs sold the Pelzer hill to P. M.
McClane for $700. Although no conclusive statement can be made about the
stones, is it possible that the blue-eyed Lumbee Indians of the
Laurinburg area of North Carolina, and the bearded Keyauwee Indians who
lived near the Chattahoochee River, could have acquired these
characteristics from intermarriage with remnants of the Roanoke Colony?
Memories of
Pelzer, CPHS Archives
How The Lost Colony Story is Changing
Bideford
,England.
By
Andy Powell
Barely five years
ago, a man arrived in Bideford with a gift from the town of Manteo in
North Carolina to celebrate the Twinning of Bideford and Manteo twenty
years previously. Bideford
had no record of that original visit and no-one came forward with
knowledge of it (shame on them). The
following year, six intrepid explorers set off from Bideford to find
this mysterious town of Manteo in the ‘US of A’. What
they uncovered set a fire in one man’s belly and he’s been spreading
that fire ever since.
Two years after the
visit, that man, Andy Powell, became Mayor of Bideford and was finally
able to put the record straight by signing a Twinning Charter with
Manteo that will stand for all time. He
also became a founder member of the ‘Bideford 500’ Group, a ‘not
for profit’ organisation who’s single intention was, and is, to
promote Bideford’s history as a means to increase tourism and thereby
create economic prosperity in a town whose population have the second
lowest incomes in Great Britain and one of the highest levels of
unemployment (over 20%).
This is what he has
to say about ‘Bideford 500’ and its story….
“In three short
years, we have learnt that Bideford has a hidden history which beggars
belief for such a small, rather run-down little town. We’d always
known about Charles Kingsley’s time in Bideford and that Sir Richard
Grenville, a relatively unknown Elizabethan, founded our Town in 1572
and it’s Port in 1575; in fact, I was his 375th Mayor or
thereabouts! But it was
when we dug deeper that we truly realised just how little we knew about
our town and it’s glorious past.
Grenville’s
involvement in the Roanoke voyages and of course the Lost Colony was
just one facet. When I went
public on that story, it didn’t take long before someone asked if I
knew about ‘Rawley the Winganditoan’ a mysterious Indian buried in
our Parish Church; about the Shipyards that used to litter the
shoreline, and their owners, the Chapman’s, Ellis’s, Harris’s,
Smith’s, Sampson’s and others (all lost colony surnames note…); the ‘Spanish Armada’ Cannons
in our municipal park; and Bideford’s contribution to fighting the
Spanish in 1588.
But it didn’t stop there; stories also emerged of American G.I’s
stationed in Bideford during WWII; Samuel Pepys the London Diarist
visiting Bideford to marry his Bideford wife Elizabeth St Michel;
Nathaniel Eaton, radical preacher and onetime first Headmaster of
Harvard University; Rudyard Kipling’s stay which influenced his book
‘Stalky and Co’; Bideford once being England’s third largest port
and largest importer of Tobacco from Virginia for over 100 years; the
5000 people who emigrated to the New World from our quayside; John
Hanning-Speke, self-proclaimed American and discoverer of the source of
the Nile who was born in Bideford; the stories of Sir Winston Churchill
and President Eisenhower meeting in Bideford to discuss the D-Day
landings; and then… just why did Bideford present Andrew Carnegie with
a casket and make him a Free Man of Bideford in 1906?
These
stories are only just beginning to be pieced together, but we had enough
on Sir Richard Grenville to celebrate our new found history. So,
 in July this year we
ran our first ever ‘mini-pageant’ based on his obtaining the
Town’s Charter from Queen Elizabeth in 1572. It was good fun dressing
up and parading around the town, people really got into the spirit of
it. I was amazed at how many people wanted a Town Tour, and even
more amazed just how many of them were locals who knew nothing of its
history. Two local schools
also played a huge part in the event providing Mummers Plays and period
music which wafted through our ancient streets, casting everything back
500 years… and virtually everyone who took part did so for free; a
very humbling thought.
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