16. Fort Raleigh National Historic Site contains the site of the first English settlement in America
The Roanoke Colony was established by English investors, among them Sir Walter Raleigh, in 1587, two decades before the establishment of the Virginia Colony at Jamestown. Although Raleigh never traveled to the colony he was a leading supporter of it, and his failure to dispatch relief expeditions is a likely cause of the colony vanishing, its fate never ascertained with certainty. There has never been any archaeological finding which points to a specific fate, and anecdotal evidence provided via oral histories is likewise inconclusive. During the American Civil War the Union Army took possession of the island off the North Carolina coast, and held it from 1862 to the end of the war. Runaway slaves were sheltered there, and in 1863 a Freedmen’s Colony was created.
The site is near two other National Sites, the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kitty Hawk, where the brothers tested kites and first achieved powered heavier than air flight, and the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. Fort Raleigh has been the site of an outdoor play entitled The Lost Colony which has been performed almost continuously since 1937, though suspended during the Second World War. The play is performed in an amphitheater built on the site of the original lost colony, and depicts what its writer believed life to have been like in the colony. In truth, after the departure of the original ships to England, no clue of what happened to the 115 colonists, including how long they survived, has ever been found. The settlement still stood in 1590, but the colonists were lost to history.