By By JONATHAN CLAYBORNE
jonathan@wdnweb.com
Staff Writer
Beaufort County’s reported connection to a lost, internationally famous Indian village could be a major tourist draw, said a speaker from the world of academia.
The draw could begin if this community’s leaders properly assessed the market for heritage tourism, Brent Lane told a crowd of Beaufort County Committee of 100 guests and members at a lunch meeting.
“Secotan is a wonderful find, if you will, if you can sell it,” Lane, director of the University of North Carolina’s Center for Competitive Economies, said in a speech at the Washington Civic Center.
A number of historians and archaeologists believe the Algonquian village known as Secotan, the capital of the Secotan Indian nation, was located in Beaufort County.
These experts said the best candidate spot for the village is at Bath’s Beasley Point, on property currently owned by phosphate-mining company PotashCorp, and they add that other candidates have been eliminated through searches over the past half-century.
“The significance of these sites is not just of local interest — it’s a world of interest,” Lane said.
Secotan was the spiritual center depicted in globally significant watercolors crafted by English gentleman John White as part of a 1585 expedition to the New World.
“They were going to establish a colony in the New World the way we set out to land on the moon,” Lane observed, adding the landing point was North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
PotashCorp is cooperating with local leaders and the nonprofit First Colony Foundation, on whose board Lane serves, in an effort to determine if Beasley Point was where Secotan was sited.
According to Tom Thompson, Beaufort County’s chief economic developer, First Colony is developing an archaeological plan for Beasley Point. PotashCorp has agreed to allow limited access to the property for an investigation of its past, Thompson related.
In his remarks to the Committee of 100, the Beaufort County Economic Development Commission’s nonprofit partner, Lane said the organizers of this county-centered search for Secotan should build a detailed plan for how many visitors they want to the attract to the region, and how long they want those visitors to stay.
The UNC center, which Lane directs, cobbles together county-level economic-development plans, among other things, he said, indicating this is the key expertise he brings to First Colony.
Speaking of tourism advantages, Lane pointed to his experience as a volunteer archaeological assistant on a First Colony dig at the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site on Roanoke Island.
“Excavations, I find, are fascinating,” he said.
The ongoing Fort Raleigh dig, profiled on the PBS series “Time Team America,” produced important information about the settlement, Lane indicated, adding he sifted through dirt that produced one of the Venetian-glass beads specifically inventoried for the Roanoke colonies as trade goods.
“That bead had not been seen in over 400 years,” Lane told his audience.
It’s the excitement of firsthand discovery at a “Secotan” dig that could entice visitors initially, he suggested.
“I want them to get in the dirt, and I want them to hold a bead,” he said, “and I want them to stay three nights to do it.”
Cultural events, similar to the long-running outdoor drama “The Lost Colony,” could entice sojourners to spend more time here, Lane pointed out.
Thompson and his allies in the Secotan search have proposed reconstructing a replica Indian village based on White’s Secotan paintings. As proposed, the village would educate tourists on some of the “prehistoric” aspects of Americans life as well as the “contact period” in which white settlers first began encountering native populations.
This concept is in the early stages, and it’s unclear how it would come to fruition, though Thompson and others have made it clear that digging into Beasley Point would be a crucial first step.
Lane acknowledged that pinpointing the exact location of Secotan could be a daunting task because it’s unlikely that any immediately conclusive identifying features — like England’s Stonehenge monoliths — will be left on hand for present-day discoverers.
“The truth is there is no ‘welcome to Secotan’ sign we hope to find in the dirt,” he said. “What can be found will be subtle.”
Among the subtleties might be impressions of post holes where buildings or fences were erected, or maybe fragments of pottery or arrowheads — or period English remnants mixed with Indian artifacts, evidence of colonial contact, he stated.
In any case, in the late 1980s, a state-led archaeological investigation of the Beasley Point property unearthed thousands of artifacts — arrowheads, other pieces — that demonstrated the point hosted a prehistoric Indian village.
And Beasley Point is one of the “most promising” sites for Secotan, Lane said.