croatoanbooks.com/why_croatoan.htm
Why “Croatoan”?
To begin with, we’re not misspelling “Croatian,” though if auto-correct could talk, that’s what it would say.
Our publishing hut is situated in Roanoke, Indiana — a dot on the map near Fort Wayne, in northeastern Indiana — and that gave us an idea, since we knew our first two titles would be, respectively, a mystery and then something at least mysterious, if not a classic mystery.
No one seems to know for sure how our little town got its name, but there have been a couple other Roanokes in North America. There’s the city in western Virginia, of course, and there was the Roanoke colony in what is now North Carolina, “an attempt by Sir Walter Raleigh to found the first permanent English settlement in North America” (Wikipedia).
That’s the one of interest here.
The colony was first established in 1585; dissolved in 1586; re-settled in 1587 — and found abandoned in 1590. Wiki says: “The fate of the approximately 112–121 colonists remains unknown.” Thus, the mystery of what became known as the Lost Colony.
The leader of the relief expedition found this word carved on the wooden palisade at the site (or maybe on a nearby tree):
CROATOANArchæologists and other scholars have plausible, if conflicting, theories about what happened — there was an Indian tribe called Croatoans, and a Croatoan Island, too — but no one knows for sure. So the mystery endures. We latter-day Roanokeans hope Croatoan Books and its mysteries will endure, too.
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