History buff searches for Lost Colony

MANTEO -- At an archaeological dig at Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, Phil Evans stepped into a meticulously measured pit and started shoveling dirt.

The Durham lawyer is no scientist. But he couldn't miss this. After 30 years of searching, he still wants to pinpoint where the English failed to establish their first permanent colony in North America.

Nearly every North Carolinian knows that a band of English settlers vanished from Roanoke Island about 1589, creating the legendary Lost Colony. No one knows where they went. An outdoor production replays the mystery year after year.

But the full story is more complex. Two colonies were launched on the northern edge of Roanoke Island in the 1500s, on what is now called called Fort Raleigh in Manteo. Despite failing to sustain a settlement, they were England's earliest land grab in North America.

It is a drama that has riveted Evans for years, first as a park ranger and later as a private citizen. The many unknowns haunt him. Exactly where did the English build cottages on Roanoke? Where did they erect a fort? Was there more than one fort?

To help find answers, Evans now leads the nonprofit First Colony Foundation, which raises money to search for colonial remains.

"It's a great story," Evans said. "But it's hard to take people around and convince them this is the site of the first colony when there is no archaeological evidence for it. "

Archaeologists, including a team that uncovered remnants of the first permanent English colony in Jamestown, donate their time. The National Park Service helps, too. But it couldn't get done without Evans, whose foundation raises thousands of dollars each year to pay for lodging, food and some labor, researchers say.

"I doubt there would be a First Colony Foundation if Phil wasn't around," said Nick Luccketti, senior archaeologist for the Jamestown digs in the 1990s. "His enthusiasm is so great it's infectious.''

On first glance, the chatty, gray-haired guy in the frayed khakis looks nothing like a mover or shaker. At this month's two-week dig, he was a self-proclaimed assistant, tackling grunt work when he could duck out of his law practice.

But Evans, 53, has been hooked on the details of America's past since growing up in Lowe's Grove, a country crossroads outside Durham. He was the type to prefer trips to Civil War battlegrounds or historic Williamsburg over ballpark outings.

After graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1975 with a history degree, he worked as a ranger at Fort Raleigh. He soaked up everything others had learned about the place, showing a keen memory for details.

"I'd mention to Phil that I was trying to remember a fact I'd read, and he'd say it's in that book, third shelf from the bottom, on page 210," said Linda Pearce, a fellow ranger with Evans at the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site.

On the right track

Evans helped uncover the most recent archaeological evidence that proves the official park site is in the right neighborhood. In early 1982, he found a barrel and hollow log -- likely remains of English colonial wells -- in the shallows of Roanoke Sound. Carbon dating pegged them to the 1500s.

In the 1990s, Evans persuaded Ivor Noel Hume, then the chief archaeologist at Colonial Williamsburg, to dig at Fort Raleigh. Evans intrigued the in-demand scholar with tantalizing evidence: Remains uncovered at Fort Raleigh in the 1960s by another archaeologist resembled a piece of a fort Noel Hume had found in Virginia.

What Noel Hume discovered, however, wasn't the long-sought fort. His team instead exhumed ruins of a 1585 workshop set up by scientist Thomas Hariot and metallurgist Joachim Gans. The pair were among the first group of 108 men that Sir Walter Raleigh dispatched to North America to create a colony here. Out of food, that group returned to England in 1586, well before the Lost Colony settlers ever left their motherland.