and a spice of lore for the og 13

sum history :

The Roanoke colony was founded on what is now Roanoke Island, North Carolina, in 1585 by governor Ralph Lane. That settlement later failed and in 1587 John White led a second colony on the same island.

This is super interesting to me because as the colonial era progressed from this, the 13 colonies developed, but they sort of developed separately if that makes sense.

Right after the American Revolution, before the ratification of the constitution and the bill of rights and such, the colonies acted as their own countries for a while, and if you asked someone from Virginia in 1790 what their nationality was, they would probably say Vrginian, not American.

With this information, i like to imagine that the original 13 colonies came into existence much earlier than America himself, making them mostly all older than him.

and that starts with Roanoke.

When the settlement led by John White came to the area, a small boy was found on the island with no parents or anyone else with him. He most certainly wasn't one of the natives, as he had a fair white complexion and wore english style clothing. This young boy was the personification of the Roanoke colony.

England (the ch) was notified that a personification of the colony had appeared, giving faith that the english had made a permanent settlement in North America.

Roanoke continued to live with the colony up until its "mysterious" disappearance in 1590.

You know how the story goes; when John White returned from England in 1590, the people had disappeared and the word 'CROATOAN' was carved into a tree trunk.

But not everyone had left. Roanoke was found by White hiding in a bush and sobbing that he didn't know where everyone went and was scared.

Roanoke didn't remember anything because the mystery of the lost colony is, well, still a mystery. No one knows 100% what happened, and there can only be speculations. Roanoke was in fact there to watch what happened to the colony, but doesn't remember because no one else remembers.

So, after White's abandoned search party for the colonists, he took Roanoke back to England, where he stayed there up until the 1650s, when people started to permanently settle and populate the area.

Roanoke had barely grown at all during this time, because the original settlement wasn't developing. He also had a very bland personality because there were no people populating his land.

The reason Roanoke stayed a personification and didn't dissolve, was because, as claimed by Sir Walter Raleigh, England made a claim to the land, and was still theirs. So little Roanoke didn't disappear.

He went back to his home in 1653 (along with the first permanent settlement in the Carolina colony) and his name was changed to Carolina.

Carolina went back to living among his people as do most personifications.

Not much happened until the 1680s-90s when the northern and southern regions of the colony began to show differences and were evolving separately. Since Carolina was originally from the northern half of the colony, he sided with the people of Northern Carolina. This led to the creation of a new personification to represent the entirety of the Carolina colony (leading Carolina to change his name to Northern Carolina). The two personifications started to resent each other, and in 1712 a formal split of the northern and southern regions was done. Northern Carolina became just North Carolina, and Carolina became South Carolina.

So with that being said, North Carolina is actually the oldest out of the og 13 and brags about it to the others lol.

tl;dr: The Roanoke Colony had a personification which became the Carolina colony but the north and south became separate so he actually became North Carolina.

*also! i used some proper capitalization in this chapter bc i realized that when you tried to read it without the capitalization is just looked like one big run-on sentence😭😭

*stay tuned bc i may end up doing something like this for Jamestown! (if y'all wanna see that lmk)