Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, North Carolina

by III Charles W. Porter

THE BOUNDARY STOCKADE.

You enter Fort Raleigh National Historic Site between two small block houses built of logs, constituting a part of the boundary stockade. This stockade is of modern construction, and originally it marked the boundary of the 16.45 acre tract of the Roanoke Island Historical Association which was administered as a North Carolina State historical park between 1935-41. In 1951, one side of the stockade was relocated and the area of the national historic site was increased to 18.50 acres. Although quite modern and located along a modern boundary, it recalls that Governor White on returning to the site of the colony in 1590 found it fortified by a palisade of tree trunks (location still unknown) and hence creates a sense of stepping upon hallowed ground upon entering the gateway. The feeling is certainly justified, because the 18.50 acres lie on the entrance side of the fort and even if the fort had held only Grenville’s 15 men they would have trod this ground many times. As there were 108 persons in the first colony under Lane, who built the fort, and 150 in the “Lost Colony,” the use of the area near the entrance to this fort must have been considerable.

SYMBOLIC LOG HOUSES.

Inside the boundary stockade you will pass a number of log houses, all of modern construction, serving various utilitarian purposes. As the true location and physical appearances of the settlers’ houses of 1585-87 are unknown, the National Park Service plans to remove these log structures when their present uses have been served.

RESTORED FORT.

The historic object of chief interest at Fort Raleigh is the fort built by Ralph Lane during 1585-86 and called by him “the new Fort in Virginia.” As the settlers of the Lost Colony of 1587 are known to have rebuilt for their own use the houses which Lane’s men constructed about the fort, it may be safely assumed that this same fort served them also for a time, at least until they found it necessary to erect the great stockade made of tree trunks that Governor White found enclosing their settlement area in 1590.

Aerial view of the restored fort.

In an earlier part of this book, the history of the fort between 1586 and 1896 has been traced. During 1935-46, National Park Service historians made intensive historical studies of all available documentary and map data relating to the fort. They concluded that the fort surveyed for the Roanoke Colony Historical Association, in 1896, was Lane’s fort and surmised that its shape was similar to that of the fort built by Lane in Puerto Rico in 1585. They could only surmise this because, unlike Lane’s fort in Puerto Rico which is shown in a drawing by John White now in the British Museum, no picture or plan of Lane’s fort on Roanoke Island has survived. National Park Service archeological work carried on under the direction of Archeologist J. C. Harrington during the summers of 1947, 1948, and 1950 established the truth of the conjectures of the historians. The true shape of the fort was made known. Enough of the fort moat, or ditch, was found intact to justify the restoration of the fort, and valuable artifact materials were recovered at the fort site and west of the fort entrance.