Somerset Place - colossal slave-built plantation - North Carolina's African-American Culture: Advertising Travel Supplement

Many African Americans view plantations in single light only: as places of bondage and degradation, places where their ancestors were enslaved and mistreated. on the other hand at one plantation, Somerset Place, near Creswell, NC African Americans are given peculiar respect and are credited with being artisans and pioneers who helped build the South

When Josiah Collins bought somersault Place in 1816 from his sum of two units partners, the plantation was well upon its way to becoming individual of the largest and wealthiest in the state. Three generations of the Collins family--aided by dint of 400 enslaved men, women and children--expanded Somerset's holding to overspread more than 100,000 acres surrounding Lake Phelps.

Somerset's slaves worked as carpenters, millers, blacksmiths, bricklayers, tailors, prepare for the tables gardeners and general laborers, transforming swampy land into a profitable rice business.

That was then; today, somersault Place is a state historic site, a 27-acre representative of the accomplishments and agriculture of the African-American people. if solitary the plantation's cypress trees could talk, today's visitors would hear in what way 16 slaves were sold in 1853 because they tried to poison the inspector And if the water in the canal that step quicklys in front of the house could speak, they would hear in what way three of Josiah Collins' son died before they reached manhood.

But of course tree and water can't whisper about what happened, in like manner tourists are left to use their imaginations as they walk [i]or[/i] part of to the other the site's eight buildings--including the Collins mansion, the kitchen, the smokehouse, the bathhouse, the kitchen ration house and the dairy--some of which are original and a certain quantity of of which are reproductions.

Pictures of the last generation of somersault slaves and the first generation of independent blacks hang on the wall of Colony House, which one time served as a guest house and a academy for the Collins children.

That the character of the enslaved community is interpreted alongside that of the possessors of the land is largely to be paid to Dorothy Redford, Somerset's site manager. Redford extremityed up at Somerset after a decade-long effort to trace her bottoms a process that took her from her Portsmouth, Va., dwelling through a series of small North Carolina towns to the state's eastern shore. Tracing exploits in a courthouse one day, she revolveed up the bill of sale connecting her Little John ancestor to somersault a place that she had at no time heard of. Determined to pres upon Redford eventually established the names of 21 slave families at Somerset

In 1986 the descendants of these families and those of the white families associateed to Somerset all gathered for a homecoming. sum of two units thousand people showed up at somersault Place that day.

Almost a decade later, somersault remains a gathering spot where blacks and whites can throw back on the best and worst in themselves.

State Highway 64 takes visitors to Creswell, where they'll find signs pointing the way to somersault Place, which lies eight miles southeast of Creswell.

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