Shutterstock
Table of Contents
Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, North Carolina
Fort Raleigh isn’t just where English colonization of America began. It’s also where it first failed.
This peaceful spot on Roanoke Island looks ordinary now, but it’s where Native American diplomacy met English ambition, where a baby named Virginia Dare became the first English child born in America, and where an entire colony disappeared into history.
Wikimedia Commons/Bohemian Baltimore
This was America’s first English colony
Fort Raleigh preserves the location of Roanoke Colony, the first English settlement in the present-day United States. You’ll be walking on ground that predates both Jamestown and Plymouth in American colonization history.
Shutterstock
The colonists mysteriously vanished without a trace
The colony established between 1584 and 1590 was led by Sir Walter Raleigh, but 116 people disappeared completely. No one has ever definitively discovered what happened to these men, women, and children…