Virginia Dare
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| Virginia Dare | |
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 US postage stamp issued in 1937, the 350th anniversary of Virginia Dare's birth
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| Born | August 18, 1587 Roanoke Island, Colony of Roanoke |
| Died | Unknown Unknown |
Virginia Dare (born August 18, 1587) was the first child born in the Americas to English parents, Eleanor (or Ellinor/Elyonor) and Ananias Dare. She was born into a short-lived colony on Roanoke Island in present-day North Carolina. What became of Virginia and the other colonists has become an enduring mystery. The fact of her birth is known because the leader of the colony and her father, John White, returned to England to seek assistance for the colony.
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[edit] Competing claims
While Dare is given credit for being the first child born of English descent in what was to become the US, manuscripts and documents in the archives of the Library of Congress of the United States indicate that the first child of European-descent born on the Atlantic coast of the United States was Martin de Arguelles. Martin was born in 1566 in St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest permanent European settlement in the United States. Martin was born about 21 years before Virginia Dare.
It has also been claimed that the first child born of modern European descent in land associated with the North American continent (Greenland) was of Norse descent, but documentation is lacking (see:Snorri Þorfinnsson).
[edit] Fiction
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 northern 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, Georgia, believed in the stones, and his views won over some well-known historians, according to contemporary press accounts. But a 1941 article by journalist Boyden Sparks in The Saturday Evening Post discredited the story, exposing absurdities in the stones' account and producing evidence that the "discoverers" were hoaxers. Pearce and the other scholars were not implicated in fraud, and no legal action was ever taken. Sparks believed the fakery was inspired by the 1937 publicity in North Carolina surrounding the 350th anniversary of the Lost Colony. Today, Brenau keeps the Dare Stones as a sort of 20th-century media curiosity, but generally does not display them or publicize their existence.
[edit] Things named after Virginia Dare
- Dare County, North Carolina
- The VDARE Project of the Center for American Unity
- Virginia Dare Trail, a section of NC 12
- Virginia Dare Bridge, the second, newest, and widest bridge spanning the Croatoan Sound connecting Roanoke Island to Manns Harbor; it carries US 64
- "The oldest wine brand in the United States" [1]
