MANTEO -- By movie-making standards in 1921, Manteo qualified as a far-flung backwater, a tiny island reachable only by boat. Hardly anyone there had ever owned a camera, let alone seen a motion picture.
But that year, North Carolina's state government spent the hefty sum of $3,000 filming the story of the Lost Colony using local actors and Outer Banks sets. It was the first movie ever shot in North Carolina. Townsfolk dressed in the plumed hats of English colonists and the headdresses of Indian tribes, putting their stamp on the new marvel of cinema.
That film was quickly eclipsed by the popular outdoor drama "The Lost Colony," still staged in Manteo, and the film fell into obscurity until last month, when a nearly pristine copy was discovered in the play's offices.
A five-minute segment of the film, now digitized, will be shown during a lecture at East Carolina University. Soon, backers hope to revive the entire 46-minute movie.
"In 1921, all the people from the Outer Banks piled on boats to see themselves on film," said Larry Tise, history professor at ECU. "They mobbed the theater in Elizabeth City. It was such a big hit that they had to show it over and over and over."
The movie helped mark a time when the Outer Banks, cut off from the rest of North Carolina, began to consider the story of its early English colonists a commodity to be shared.
The idea came from Mabel Evans Jones, superintendent of Dare County schools who had studied in New York and had seen movies there as their popularity spread.
When she heard that the state government wanted to make a historical film, she successfully pitched the Lost Colony idea as a way to get the story into North Carolina schools.
Its title hardly rolled off the tongue: "The Earliest English Expeditions and Attempted Settlements in the Territory of What is Now the United States, 1584-1591."
Although the film was made by the Atlas Film Co. of Chicago with a single cameraman, locals made the entire production happen. R.C. "Dick" Evans, father of Mabel Evans Jones, allowed a room in his hotel and store to be used for costume design, said Sarah Downing, assistant curator of the Outer Banks History Center.
A cast of hundreds
"There were about 300 people in Manteo, and they used all 300 people," said Lebame Houston, historian with the Roanoke Island Historical Association, who discovered the film copy. "The total involved was 374, so [Jones] had to import some."
The film was distributed statewide and shown at least into the 1980s. It can't compare with Paul Green's 1937 play, Houston said, but it did set up a grass-roots movement behind the local history, which helped win federal backing for the play.
A product of its times
The film shows graphic violence between the colonists and the Indians, including a scene where the English fire on unarmed natives they suspect of stealing a silver chalice. Tise said it is best viewed along with historical context, and Houston will speak when it is shown Thursday at ECU.
A few other copies of the film exist, but they are in poor shape.
The copy found in "The Lost Colony" administrative offices is thought to be the only surviving copy in good condition, and a 1971 narration from Jones also was found there.
To see it is to watch movie-making unfold and to see North Carolina make its first appearance on film, telling the world its best-known stories.
