RCRO NL 4.2 Fort Raleigh

On May 20 and 21, the National Park Service held a workshop at the Elizabethan Gardens in Manteo, North Carolina, to help formulate a mission statement for the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site. A group of Park Service employees, scholars, civic leaders, and other interested people developed a draft mission statement for the historic site and identified issues facing park management.

Though in existence since 1941, Fort Raleigh National Historic Site has never had a general management plan. With the addition of lands in 1990, the Park Service site now includes not only the traditional location of the 1580s English attempts to establish a colony, but also the sites of the Civil War Freedmen's Colony and Reginald Fessenden's early twentieth-century radio experiments.

With these new additions in mind, the workshop identified several areas of significance that indicate Fort Raleigh National Historic Site's special nature. Included was that Fort Raleigh National Historic Site is the location of the earliest English scientific laboratory in what is now the United States and of the only known archaeological remains associated with the first English colonies in the New World. As the traditional site of the 1580s colonies, the site commemorates a number of significant events associated with the first English colony in the New World: the birth of Virginia Dare; the first English documentation of native Americans and natural resources in the New World; and the first extended contact between Native Americans and the English.

Later significant associations with the site were also identified. In the nineteenth century, it was the location of the first officially sanctioned Freedman's Colony during the Civil War. And in the twentieth century, the site was the location where Fessenden transmitted the first musical notes by radio waves and where Paul Green's The Lost Colony was and continues to be produced-America's first outdoor symphonic drama, an ongoing and original art form.

Workshop members identified two special mandates for the historic site. First, the National Park Service by agreement with Roanoke Island Historical Association allows for production of The Lost Colony at the Waterside Theatre. And, according to the 1990 acquisition bill, "The Secretary [of the Interior] in consultation with scholarly and other historic organizations, shall undertake research on the history and archaeology of the historic site, and the associated people and events."

Bringing all of this material together, the workshop members formulated the following draft mission statement:

Fort Raleigh National Historic Site preserves and interprets the history and remains of the first attempt at English colonization in the New World and the colony's relationship between the Native Americans and the colonists. It provides the setting for The Lost Colony, the first outdoor symphonic drama. Roanoke Island continued to play an important role during the Civil War and its aftermath including establishment of the Freedmen's Colony. Fort Raleigh was the site of Reginald Fessenden's pioneering radio transmissions. Fort Raleigh encompasses significant elements from prehistoric Native American culture through twentieth-century technology.

The draft statement will be distributed to workshop members for further comment and editorial corrections.

With a new mission statement in hand, workshop members formulated lists of site goals and management issues that the National Park Service will want to take into account as it formulates its mission goals and long term management plans. Among the site goals were:

Further examination of how to deal with shoreline erosion
Improvement of the visitors center, park headquarters, and Lost Colony building, all of which are at the end of their thirty-year life cycle
Historical and archaeological research on all significant events in Roanoke Island history
Examining whether the name "Fort Raleigh National Historic Site" is the appropriate name or whether it leads to visitor misconception about what can be seen at the site
Examining the possibility of recognizing Native American populations through a memorial at the site
Development of a Friends of Fort Raleigh National Historic Site group

Visitor circulation between The Lost Colony, the historic site, and the Elizabethan Gardens
Relating the historic site to programs in the local school system
The local business community's desire to help promote the site
A general lack of information about natural resources on the Park Service's property
The need for an administrative history of Fort Raleigh National Historic Site
The need to catalog all of the artifacts in the park and to formulate an overall plan of archaeological work
That a Shakespeare Festival is under development for the off season
That ecotourism is a useful tool and underutilized at this site

In order to further examine ways to improve Fort Raleigh National Historic Site and to implement its newly written mission and developing park management goals, two additional workshops are planned for the fall. One will be to develop proposals concerning the archaeological development of the site. The second will be a "compelling story" workshop in September to suggest how the overall story of the site's significance can be interpreted for the general public. For more information on the draft mission statement and developing park management plan, contact the Cape Hatteras Group, Rt. 1, Box 675, Manteo, NC 27954.