North Carolina state parks have announced the acquisition of a 1,000-acre tract in Bertie County to be managed as the new Salmon Creek State Natural Area. Archaeologists have been examining artifacts at the site, which they say provide evidence that survivors from The Lost Colony relocated to the area in the late 1580s.
A news release from the N.C. Division of Parks and Recreation describes the property as featuring 3½ miles of beautiful frontage along Salmon Creek, floodplain forests of cypress-gum swamp and bottomland hardwood forest, and tidal freshwater marsh recognized as ecologically significant by the N.C. Natural Heritage Program.
The property, below in a North Carolina Coastal Land Trust photo, is located south of U.S. 17 near where Salmon Creek enters the Albemarle Sound.
Because it is a natural area and not a state park, Salmon Creek will have little development but will be open to visitors for wildlife observation and photography, Katie Hall, a spokesman with the Division of Parks and Recreation, told the Daily Reflector in Greenville.
There is no plan for it to become a state park because the area is a rare habitat and contains archaeological sites. The master plan will include provisions for protecting the archaeological site if the public is allowed to access the area, Hall said.
Researchers associated with The First Colony Foundation have worked the site and found native Algonquin and English artifacts indicative of settlement by the Roanoke colonists, the news release says.
The Lost Colony was the second attempt at a permanent English settlement in the New World. It was established in 1587 at Roanoke Island, which today is Manteo in Dare County, N.C. After John White, the leader of the colony, went to England to get more supplies, he returned in 1590 to find the settlement deserted. The fate of the colonists, including Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World, has never been determined.
The Fort Raleigh National Historic Site on Roanoke Island commemorates the Lost Colony at its original site.
The First Colony Foundation, in an August 2015 reference to “Site X” in Bertie County says, “Evidence has been found to support an interpretation that a few of the Lost Colonists were present for some time on a site in the area concealed on a 16th century map made by John White, the colony’s governor and grandfather of Virginia Dare.”
In January 2017, a Raleigh real estate broker listed the Salmon Creek tract for sale as a prime waterfront development that, according to the North Carolina Coastal Land Trust, had already been permitted for a 2,800-unit development and a 212-slip marina. The Trust bought it and gave is to the N.C. Division of Parks and Recreation “as soon as the loan was paid off.”
Money to buy the land came from grants by the Clean Water Management Trust Fund, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, N.C. Attorney General’s Environmental Enhancement Grant Fund, N.C. Parks and Recreation Trust Fund, the Enviva Forest Conservation Fund and the U.S. Department of Defense, the state’s news release says.
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