Visitors to the “Lost Colony” on Roanoke Island, N.C., should consider exploring the “history, mystery and fantasy” contained within the Elizabethan Gardens, an “English pleasure garden” that is part of the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site.
In 1953, the Garden Club
of North Carolina leased this site from the Roanoke Island Historical
Association to establish a cultural attraction to enhance the value of the area
and serve as a permanent memorial to Sir Walter Raleigh’s colonists who came from
England in 1585-87.
Elizabethan Gardens features a statue of Virginia Dare as a young woman. She was the first child born to English colonists at Roanoke Island in 1587.
“The poignant mystery surrounding
the Lost Colony caught the imagination of Maria Louisa Lander (1826-1923) of
Salem, Mass., a professional sculptor,” wrote John Buford, the marketing
officer at Elizabethan Gardens.
Lander envisioned Virginia Dare as a revered princess within a blended society of native Croatoans and the lost colonists.
Working in a studio in Rome, Italy, in the late 1850s, Lander used a large pillar of white marble from a quarry at Carrara in Tuscany. “After 14 months of labor, she completed her statue and placed it aboard a sailing vessel headed for Boston. The vessel encountered a severe storm off the coast of Spain and was wrecked, sending its cargo to the bottom,” Buford said.
“Two years later, the ship’s cargo was salvaged, including the statue of Virginia Dare. Lander was forced to ‘buy back’ her statue, which she restored to its original beauty and exhibited in Boston.”
Upon her death, Lander willed the Virginia Dare statue to the State of North Carolina. Someone in Raleigh thought it would be a good idea to pass the artwork along to “The Lost Colony” outdoor drama that was scheduled to open in 1937.
The National Park Service (NPS) owned the property where the Waterside Theater was being built. NPS bureaucrats quashed that idea of displaying Virginia Dare’s statue on federal land, because “there was no authenticated record that Ms. Dare ever lived to maidenhood,” Buford said.
“So, the statue remained in its shipping crate backstage at the theater until after World War II,” when Albert Quentin “Skipper” Bell, who was responsible for building the theater, decided the statue would look good on the Chapel Hill lawn of Paul Green, playwright of “The Lost Colony.”
“Green never got around
to erecting the statue on his estate,” Buford said. Green was more than happy to
“regift” it to the Garden Club and plant Virginia Dare where she truly belonged
– on Roanoke Island.
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“Today, our ‘maiden of mystery’ stands in her own niche at the foot of an ancient live oak,” Buford said. “She gazes dreamily beyond the trees toward the softened surge of nearby Roanoke Sound.”
Occasionally, a ghostly white female deer can be seen ducking in and out of the shadows on the island, as the hour approaches dusk. The doe is making her rounds to provide protection to the inhabitants. The animal is a central figure in the “Legend of Virginia Dare.”
One of the most stunning paintings of Virginia Dare as a beautiful princess was created by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (1863-1930) of Philadelphia, Pa. His collection of 78 paintings, known as “the Pageant of a Nation,” is the largest series of American historical paintings by a single artist.
Ferris painted Virginia
Dare with long, curling auburn hair, wearing a typical Native American garment
of the early 17th century.
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