The Lost Rocks: The Dare Stones and the Unsolved Mystery of Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony by David La Vere

Author:David La Vere
Format: epub

Chapter 9

Preponderance of the Evidence

Professor Haywood Pearce Jr. was ready at that moment to declare the Dare Stones as authentic, all forty-seven of them. He firmly believed the upcoming scientific conference would prove it. While he might have sometimes doubted Eberhardt and his ability to find stones almost on command, Pearce was ultimately convinced by Mrs. Jett’s stone-in-the-toolbox. As Pearce had been told, it had lain in the toolbox for fifteen years, long before Eberhardt had come along. “If hoax it is,” Pearce was quoted, “the hoax is more incredible, more fantastic than the story itself.”⁹³ Now he’d have the academics take a look and they’d be just as convinced.

In their invitations to the scholars, the Pearces told a brief version of the Stones. They also pointed out that on one Stone, lichen partially covered three letters. “These lichens are well known to be of very slow growth – hence the carving must have been done many years ago.” So a select group of historians and scientists were invited to come to Brenau College for a noon meeting on Saturday, October 19, 1940. At that meeting, Haywood Pearce Jr. of Emory University and Brenau College would fill them in on the finding of the Dare Stones. After that, participants would have the chance to inspect the Stones and then there would be another 8 p.m. meeting “to discuss the problems raised by the stones.” The next morning, a “special group of invited guests” would be taken to the cave on the Chattahoochee to see Eleanor’s carving on the rock ledge. As an added inducement, the invitation announced that “Dr. S. E. Morison, Head Professor at Harvard University has accepted an invitation to preside at this meeting.”⁹⁴

The academic glitterati began arriving at Brenau around October 18. Eventually thirty-four of America’s best and brightest historians, geologists, ethnologists, archaeologists, linguists, and other experts gathered at the tiny women’s college. Some of those attending included Drs. E. M. Coulter of the University of Georgia; J. Harris Purks, Robert E. Mitchell, Garland G. Smith, Thomas English, R. H. McLean, and J. F. Messick, all of Emory University in Atlanta; Robert Wauchope of the University of North Carolina; Count Gibson, a geologist at Georgia Tech, and C. C. Crittenden of the North Carolina Historical Commission.

Headlining the gathering was Samuel Eliot Morison, chair of the Department of American History at Harvard, president of the American Antiquarian Society, and exposer of historical frauds. Born in 1882, a son of the Boston upper crust, Morison received a privileged education and graduated from Harvard in 1908. Continuing his studies, he received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard in 1912 and returned there as a history instructor in 1915. He would remain connected to Harvard for the rest of his life, rising up through the ranks to become full professor and head of the history department. Up to 1940, Morison’s most famous works were The Oxford History of the United States in 1927 and, with Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republic in 1930.

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