By 1925 local residents performed a full-scale pageant of the story, using pantomime, music, and narration. W. O. Sounders, editor of the Elizabeth City Independent, was a passionate supporter of the pageant and supported expanding the celebration. Mabel Evans Jones, Roanoke Island native and Dare County School Superintendent, wrote, produced and starred in a 1921 silent film of the historic events. The film was shown across North Carolina. It was the first silent film produced in the state. The 1926 pageant attracted the largest crowd to that point, and organizers sought to build on their achievement. They began to prepare to mark the 350th anniversary of Virginia Dare's birth. They approached North Carolina playwright Paul Green about developing a new pageant script. Having visited the island on several occasions, Green had already considered writing a piece about "those tragic first settlers." He joined with Saunders and Bradford Fearing, president of the Roanoke Historical Society, to develop a play to celebrate the 350th anniversary of Virginia Dare's birth. Initially, the team imagined a plot to tell the legend of Virginia Dare's falling in love with Chief Manteo's son and giving birth to a new race that has since vanished. To raise interest in the pageant, they planned to conduct a nationwide beauty contest to find a young woman to play Virginia Dare. But Green envisioned a spectacle with a combination of music, dialogue, and dance, which he called "symphonic drama". He wanted the drama to express community ideals of freedom, struggle, and perseverance—guiding themes for a nation in the grips of the Great Depression. The original production had difficulty finding funding; early pledges of support evaporated as the depression deepened. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) of President Franklin D. Roosevelt helped provide funding and labor for the production through its various agencies; it supported theater groups, writers and artists among the people who were put to work during the Great Depression. North Carolina Congressman Lindsay Warren secured the production of 25,000 memorial half dollars to be sold to raise funds. English-born architect Albert Quentin "Skipper" Bell began construction of the large-scale set with assistance from workers of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Previously, Bell had designed a village of log-structures on the grounds of Fort Raleigh. Through the Federal Theatre Project, WPA funds were used for salaries as part of a Theatre Works initiative to assist out-of-work Broadway actors from New