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Virginia Dare (18 August 1587 – 27 June, 1597, legal death) was the first child to be born in America of English parents on Roanoke Island in the Colony of Roanoke, now in North Carolina.
Her parents, Eleanor (Ellinor, Elyonor) and Ananias Dare, had been among the approximately 120 settlers who left England on 8 May, 1587, on an expedition sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh had intended that the settlement should be established in the Chesapeake Bay area, but the captain of their ship, the Lion, had his passengers land instead on Roanoke Island, the site of an unsuccessful earlier colonization venture.
Aside from the circumstances of her birth, Virginia Dare's life remains a mystery. Nine days after her birth, on 27 August, 1587, her grandfather, Governor John White, left the colony for England, acting as Roanoke's agent in obtaining further aid and assistance for the colony. He arrived in England that November as the nation was about to go to war with Spain. It was not until August 1590 that White reached Roanoke with a relief expedition. It found no trace of the settlers—only the word "croatoan" carved on a post. The infant Virginia Dare had vanished along with all other Roanoke colonists. Some believe that the survivors of the "Lost Colony" were absorbed into the Croatan tribe. Others believe that the colonists moved to another nearby island, although no trace was found.
Dare County, North Carolina and the immigration reform VDARE Project of the Center for American Unity are named after Virginia Dare.
A woman named Virginia Dare appears in Gregory Keyes' fantasy novel The Briar King. Keyes uses several hints and word clues to indicate this character is meant to be the historical figure. Another fictionalized version of Virginia appears in the Neil Gaiman Marvel comic 1602.
From 1937 until 1941, the so-called "Dare Stones" were in the news. The carved stones were allegedly found in North Georgia and the Carolinas. The first bore an announcement of Virginia Dare's death. Later ones, brought in by various people, told a complicated tale of the fate of the Lost Colony.
Professor Haywood Pearce Jr. of Brenau College (now Brenau University) in Gainesville, Ga., believed in the stones, and his views won over some well-known historians, according to contemporary press accounts. But a 1941 article in The Saturday Evening Post discredited the whole business, exposing absurdities in the stones' account and producing evidence that the "discoverers" were hoaxers. Pearce and the other scholars were not implicated in fraud.
Today, Brenau keeps the stones as a sort of 20th-century media curiosity, but generally does not display them or publicize their existence. Except for a few die-hard believers in "alternative history," they are mostly forgotten.
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