The Secret Token

by Andrew Lawler

  In 1938, to the relief of anxious Emory administrators, Pearce junior purchased the rock from Hammond with funds sent to the finder’s post office box through an Oakland bank. Whether he used his father’s or Brenau College funds, or whether five hundred or a thousand dollars was paid, is unclear. A 1966 letter from a successor to Pearce senior states that the college paid five hundred dollars, but officials at Brenau today, where the stone remains, say no receipt has yet surfaced.

  The Pearces made at least one cast of the famous rock and had it displayed at the Georgia exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair. It proved one of the most popular items on view at the fairgrounds in Flushing. This was more than just irritating to many North Carolinians. Another state was baldly usurping their identity as the home of the first English settlers in the Americas, and it was doing so in front of the entire world. A British diplomat who saw the Dare Stone at the fair requested a cast for the British Museum to reside in proximity to White’s watercolors.

  Pearce senior complained about “considerable skepticism” and “some ridicule” emanating from North Carolina regarding the stone. He and his son dismissed this criticism as sour grapes. Hammond had brought the stone of his own free will to a Georgia institution, not to Duke or the University of North Carolina.

  Pearce then set out to find the other mysterious rock—the one mentioned on Hammond’s stone—and to do so without interference from jealous North Carolina rivals or skeptical Emory bureaucrats. He took a leave of absence from Emory and devoted all his time to researching the rock. Father, stepmother, and son embarked on several expeditions to Edenton to survey and excavate during 1938 and 1939. “With the second stone in hand, competent scientists may be enlisted who can proceed with confidence toward the search for the remains of the first Americans, Raleigh’s Lost Colony of Roanoke,” father and son wrote in a 1939 Brenau newsletter.

  The excavations in the Edenton area, done with the help of local African Americans, came to nothing. “I believe our best chance to find it and also to find the burial place of the Lost Colonists is to give the matter as wide publicity as possible,” Pearce senior explained in a 1939 letter to a friend, adding, “I personally have little doubt that they are in Chowan County,” where Edenton was located. Desperate, the Pearces offered a five-hundred-dollar reward for a clue, a small fortune in the Depression-era South.

  A cottage industry in Lost Colony rocks immediately sprang up. Men appeared out of the Carolina swamps with inscribed stones related to the Roanoke voyages. The Pearces and the North Carolina state historian, Charles Crittenden, vied to obtain these objects, fearful that the other side would get the jump on the historical sensation of the decade.

  When a crudely carved stone with Virginia Dare’s name scratched on its surface appeared in the small town of Columbia, between Roanoke Island and Edenton, Crittenden made the long journey, only to be rebuffed by the rock’s owner. Finally he cajoled the man into allowing the rock to be taken to the state museum in Raleigh for study.

  A distinguished panel of more than a dozen historians, archaeologists, and English scholars gathered to consider the new find. The rock was determined to be ballast stone brought from England. But the panel concluded, “Every mark seems as fresh as if made yesterday.” The rock was quickly returned to its owner, who was harshly criticized in the local press for his deception. So when a stonecutter named Bill Eberhardt showed up at Brenau in May 1939 carrying a rock with shallow chisel marks and the date 1589, the Pearces sent him packing.

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  Eberhardt, a gaunt man in his thirties who lived on the nearby Chattahoochee River, was persistent. He returned with yet another stone a few weeks later that had a list of fifteen Lost Colonists—presumably those massacred at the instigation of the shamans—and a date of 1591.

  The Pearces agreed to accompany Eberhardt to the place where he said he found the rocks on a hill outside Greenville, South Carolina, in the rolling uplands of the state and nearly four hundred miles southwest of Edenton. They were, for reasons that remain obscure, quickly convinced of the stone’s legitimacy and promptly bought several acres around the site for eight hundred dollars.

  “We now have the grave stone which was placed on the graves of the seventeen massacred colonists,” Pearce senior wrote in triumph to the North Carolina Historical Commission on July 11, 1939. The rock, he added, “contains the names of Ananias and Virginia Dare and fifteen others.” He noted that the object was found three hundred miles from Roanoke Island before bluntly refusing the commission’s request for a cast of the first Dare Stone.

  The Pearces set to work digging for the colonists’ remains in the midsummer heat. A month later, Pearce senior admitted privately that after a month of hard work they had again found nothing. “Our excavations where the stones were found have thus far been fruitless,” he wrote to the president of Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia. “However, the soil there is red clay and parties who have experience in this area report that nothing is left after fifty to seventy-five years. So I have almost abandoned hope of finding any skeletons.”

  Eberhardt, however, retained his magic touch for finding carved stones with a strange circular writing that differed markedly from the first Dare Stone. He never left them in place, as the Pearces demanded, but always carried them to the door of their Victorian home at Brenau or their trenches in South Carolina. That summer he presented more than a dozen stones telling a harrowing sequel to the Hammond inscription.

  In them, Eleanor described dozens of surviving colonists trekking inland to the Appalachians, gradually picked off one by one by hostile Native Americans. It was too good a story to keep secret, and Brenau College made an official announcement on July 25, 1939. “If the authenticity of these stones is established, some commonly accepted facts in American history must be discarded,” noted the Atlanta Constitution on its front page. The Lost Colonists had apparently trekked deep into the South long before the English were thought to have explored the region.

  To win the backing of the skeptical scholarly community, Pearce junior organized an academic conference for September, inviting historians from around the country. The meeting was abruptly canceled when a new wave of stones appeared at the Pearces’ door. This set of ten stones, a few found by people other than Eberhardt, recorded an increasingly frantic Eleanor encouraging her father to continue his search as her dwindling band sought a safe refuge in what was now northeastern Georgia. One was said by a local man to have been picked up within six miles of the college. The trail that began on Roanoke Island passed nearly to Pearce’s doorstep.

  Caught up in the excitement of the hunt, they didn’t stop to question this peculiar coincidence.

  More carved stones followed in 1940, including eight that led to an Atlanta suburb and completed the horrifying gothic tale with an uplifting end. Eleanor birthed another child, Agnes, with her new husband, an Indian king, and settled down in a Cherokee village. A ledge over a cave that Eberhardt found on the Chattahoochee River was carved with “Eleanor Dare heyr sit hence 1593.” Another stone revealed she was buried in 1599 “on a great hill” but not before pleading with her father to take her daughter back to England.

  By the time thirty-four scientists arrived at Brenau on October 19, 1940, for the long-postponed academic meeting, the nation had been following the latest Dare Stone finds in the newspapers like a popular serial. Reporters swarmed a meeting that included some of the most famous names in academia, including the presiding scholar, Harvard’s Samuel Eliot Morison.

  Morison, who that year published a seminal volume on American history, was a famous skeptic of fraudulent artifacts. He had publicly dismissed the Drake brass plate as a hoax, infuriating its Berkeley backer. He noted with disapproval that this professor, who had long sought the artifact, had “provided an irresistible temptation for some joker to have fun at the expense of the distinguished professor.” Morison�
�s word carried enormous weight among his colleagues and with the public.

  The crowd of reporters was shut out of the three-hour evening session in which the assembled historians, geologists, and archaeologists debated the authenticity of the stones and heard testimony from some of the finders, including a man who said he found one stone embedded in a wall of an old gristmill that had stood longer than anyone could remember. All those connected with the stones were rural Georgians of varying degrees of literacy who seemed unlikely perpetrators of an elaborate Elizabethan hoax. After examining the stones and all the available evidence, a committee of the leading experts chaired by Morison declared, “The story told by the stones is in perfect harmony with facts related by history,” adding, “The preponderance of evidence points to the authenticity of the stones.”

  At a crowded press conference, however, Morison hedged his bets, telling reporters that the stones were either astonishing discoveries or colossal hoaxes.

  Most journalists ignored the hedging, telling their readers that top American academics believed the stones’ lurid tale—of a young woman trying to hold together a lost band of Elizabethans among savage Indians—was now historical fact. “Dare Stones Appear Authentic to Experts,” read the headline of Raleigh’s News and Observer, which had broken the first story in 1938 but had remained skeptical of Pearce’s claims. “Atlanta (only ten miles from where the stone trail ends) has undisputed possession of Scarlett O’Hara. It looks like now she has a Half Nelson on Eleanor Dare,” the newspaper concluded.

  The Lost Colony was no longer lost, and its story was now a respectable part of American history. Revelations made at the meeting that the principal discoverer, Eberhardt, had a history himself of faking Indian relics received little attention. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to believe the carved messages.

  A month later, Morison’s committee set out a research plan in order to certify the stones’ authenticity. This called for further analysis of the stones’ makeup, excavations to find graves or other relics of the colonists, and an intense study of the words and phrases to ensure their Elizabethan usage. The panel also recommended that the writing be compared with graffiti from the era as well as a thorough investigation of Eberhardt’s past and rumors that a man in the 1930s hawked fake stones on Roanoke Island. The committee urged Pearce to cooperate with other academics, particularly North Carolinians.

  The historian, with the backing of his father and stepmother, ignored the recommendations. Instead of pursuing the scientific analyses, Pearce junior helped a local playwright produce a script based on the dramatic tale told by the rocks, which was designed to compete directly with North Carolina’s Lost Colony. He even contacted Cecil B. DeMille when he heard the famous Hollywood director—whose father was born not far from Roanoke Island—was considering a movie version of the Roanoke settlers. “We would be glad to receive you or your accredited representative at Brenau College and provide any further help in our power,” Pearce wrote.

  DeMille replied politely that the Dare Stones were “extremely interesting” and added that their story was “one of the most fascinating” in American history. He acknowledged that he was considering a film on the Lost Colony but added that he was still “studying the subject.” Pearce wrote again but never heard back.

  Meanwhile, the Georgia stonecutter continued to find stones with regularity, including one that told of two remaining colonists, including the young Agnes, imprisoned in 1603.

  Eager to bring this remarkable tale to the American public, Pearce wrote up a lengthy piece about the Dare Stones and sent it to one of the nation’s oldest and most circulated magazines, the Saturday Evening Post. The editors contacted Morison after looking over the manuscript. This time, the Harvard professor did not hedge. “I personally went to Gainesville to investigate the Eleanor Dare Stones and believe them to be genuine, as did the other professors present,” the historian replied.

  The Post asked a staff writer, Boyden Sparkes, to fact-check the piece. Sparkes was an imposing man and enterprising writer who had taken a bullet through the leg and scalp in 1921 while covering a miners’ conflict in West Virginia. He worked for newspapers around the nation and ghostwrote autobiographies of wealthy Americans such as automotive magnate Walter Chrysler. He had married into a well-connected North Carolina family, spent time on the Carolina coast, and was no doubt aware of the controversy when he took on the assignment.

  Sparkes visited Pearce at Brenau. “I’m still open-minded,” he told the reporter. “I never say they are authentic. It’s too early.” Yet Sparkes found that he “becomes resentful when his stones are challenged.”

  In speaking with Pearce’s Emory colleagues from the original study team, Sparkes found them doubtful of the stones’ authenticity, despite the imprimatur from Morison. Lester, the geologist who was the first to encounter Hammond, said that one of the Eberhardt stones—number 25—appeared freshly carved. In a report, he wrote, “It makes me believe it has been doctored…the lack of lichenous material in the grooves seems to be the first glaring drawback to any of the stones that I have seen.” He told Sparkes that this particular object was a fake.

  Lester and Purks, eager to protect their professional reputations, quietly helped Sparkes assemble his case. At his request they checked the books that Pearce, their longtime colleague, took out of the Emory library prior to the find of the first stone. They found no evidence that he had been researching Elizabethan history before Hammond’s arrival or that he might be part of a larger conspiracy.

  But the reporter latched onto news of Eberhardt’s past—his faked Indian relics, including stones with Mayan and Aztec designs. He discovered that the stonecutter had ties with the other two Georgians who had presented Dare Stones to Pearce. He also found that Eberhardt’s main source of income was selling moonshine.

  One night Sparkes confronted him in his cabin on the Chattahoochee. “Bill was in bed,” Sparkes wrote with a reporter’s eye for detail. “On his head was a khaki deer-stalker hat. He was wearing the jumper of his overall. The overalls were hanging stiffly on a nail in the wall. He is a disorderly hermit. He was reading the picture section of an Atlanta paper.” He found the man “a sly, cagey fellow with a streak of humor.” Eberhardt was too smart to confess, but Sparkes concluded that he had given Pearce “42 stones, all forgeries, for which he was paid a total of about $2000. A few others were provided by Eberhardt’s cohorts.” (Those forty-two did not, however, include the first Dare Stone found by Hammond.)

  Sparkes’s April 1941 magazine article, “Writ on Rocke: Has America’s First Murder Mystery Been Solved?,” was an investigative tour de force. Sparkes laid out Pearce’s delusions—and hinted at possible collusion—with devastating thoroughness and a tough sarcastic edge. He ended the piece noting that the words “Emory,” “Atlanta,” and “Fake” could be read in some of the Eberhardt stones as acrostics, like in a crossword puzzle. A Georgia hillbilly had outwitted not just Pearce but some of the nation’s finest minds.

  “I am sure,” Sparkes concluded dryly, “that Eleanor Dare had nothing to do with it.”

  Soon after the article appeared, Eberhardt met with Lucile Pearce to hand over a new inscription. This one read, “Pearce and Dare Historical Hoaxes. We Dare Anything.” His streak of humor had taken a dark turn to blackmail, and he threatened to expose the Pearces if they didn’t pay him off.

  Pearce junior confronted Eberhardt, who refused to sign a document admitting he had faked the stones. The historian went to the Atlanta Journal. The May 15, 1941, story laid out the sordid saga in a banner headline on its front page titled “Hoax Claimed by ‘Dare Stones’ Finder in Extortion Scheme, Dr. Pearce Charges.” The news topped the day’s reports on Hitler’s invasion of Iraq and Rudolf Hess’s flight from Nazi Germany to Britain. Other newspapers quickly jumped on the story. “Eleanor Dare Stones Are Branded Fraudulent,” said the headline in the New York Herald Tribune. A liquor
company took advantage of the publicity to print an advertisement showing the faked rocks headed “Easy to Be Fooled!” decrying “Thousands Spent for ‘Rocks of Roanoke.’ ”

  Pearce’s reputation as a serious scholar was ruined. The others involved in the authentication effort distanced themselves from the scandal. Lester said later that he had known all along the letters were sandblasted, and Morison disingenuously insisted that he had declared the stones fake while presiding at the Brenau meeting.

  An unhappy silence descended on the Pearce home. The historian’s niece, Sissy Lawson, said that the family never discussed the Dare Stone embarrassment. (“All I remember is that Pearce senior, my grandfather, gave me a thrashing when I knocked over his chess table,” she told me when I tracked her down in Gainesville.)

  The European war and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December pushed the Dare Stones out of the headlines and the public mind. Pearce junior joined the U.S. Army in 1942, and his father died the following year. His stepmother, Lucile, took over the school briefly and then died when she drove her car into an oak tree in 1946. That year, Pearce junior moved to distant East Michigan University in Ypsilanti, where he remained until his retirement in 1963. He never published again, save for a brief 1947 paper on Spanish friars in Georgia. Lawson said her uncle rarely visited his hometown after the war, preferring to spend his summers at a boys’ camp in the mountains of Georgia that his father had founded.

  “He was an affable gentleman with a shock of white hair and sense of humor,” recalled Reinhard Wittke, an East Michigan historian who shared an office with Pearce in the 1950s until Pearce’s retirement. He recalled an absentminded man well respected by his students. But when I asked Wittke about the Dare Stones, he was baffled. “Never heard of them,” he said. “[Pearce] never talked about his past.” It was a strange comment to make about a historian. Pearce died in 1971 in Florida and returned to Brenau only to be buried in the family plot next to his father and stepmother.