Somerset Place (NC Historic Site)

Located on the banks of Phelps Lake, Somerset Place is a representative antebellum plantation offering a view of life during the period before the Civil War. It became one of North Carolina's most prosperous rice, corn, and wheat plantations.

http://www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us/sections/hs/somerset/somerset.htm

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• A House Divided: America in the Age of Lincoln Explores America before the Civil War, slavery, the slavery debate, the events leading to the war, the war itself, and how it affected politics and society. Learn also about the state of the country once the war ended and what obstacles lay ahead for the country at this tenuous time. Includes historical images and primary source documents.
• Documenting the American South Ten thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs for the study of Southern history, literature, and culture.
• Antebellum North Carolina An online collection of primary documents and images from the antebellum in North Carolina that accompany a lesson place about antebellum society in North Carolina with regard to reform movements and the history and status of blacks.
• Lesson plan: Living History - Civil War After researching antebellum North Carolina and the role of North Carolina in the Civil War, students will write, edit, publish, and produce their own plays.
  
• Lesson plan: Antebellum North Carolina In this lesson students will examine pictures & documents relating to the Hayes Plantation (Edenton, NC). Students will also use various maps of North Carolina to help them analyze how James Cathcart Johnston (owner of Hayes Plantation) used, modified and adapted to the physical environment of Edenton.
  
  Students will decipher original manuscripts from the Southern Historical Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill Campus and draw conclusions about antebellum society in North Carolina with regard to reform movements and the history and status of blacks.
  
  From a list of volumes found in the Hayes Plantation Library exhibit at the North Carolina Collection Gallery, students will determine what catagories of books were most prevalent in the library and hypothesize as to why those types of books would be so important to an antebellum plantation owner.
  
  Click Here to access Photographs & documents relating to this lesson plan.
• Lesson plan: Civil War Journals Integrates creative writing with social studies and enhances knowledge of the effects of the Civil War on people.

Related pages

• Mendenhall Plantation: A visit to the Mendenhall Plantation shows students that there were dissenters to slavery in antebellum North Carolina. Buildings on the property include the main house, an old school house, the Madison Lindsay House and Medical School, a spring house, and a barn. There is also a restored wagon that may have been used to help runaway slaves.
• Historic Stagville: Read about the history of the plantation, the Bennehan and Cameron families who owned the plantation, the slave community, the structures on the plantation, and the effect the Civil War had on Stagville Plantation.
• The Foscue Plantation House: This restored plantation home exhibits family artifacts and period pieces. As a Union hospital during the Civil War, it was spared destruction by Federal forces.

Related topics

• Learn more about 18th century, 19th Century, African Americans, North Carolina, Washington County, antebellum, civil war, historic site, history, and slavery.

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This historic site offers a comprehensive and realistic view of nineteenth-century life on a large-scale North Carolina plantation. The interpretive tours "integrate the lifestyles of all of the plantation’s residents into one concise chronological social history of the plantation’s eighty-year life span. Through one general tour visitors explore the lives of the plantation’s owners, enslaved community, employed whites, and free blacks." The plantation, which was owned by the Collins family, was home to 800 slaves who came from their West African homeland in 1786. Students will participate in hands-on programs which show the daily life on the plantation during the antebellum period. They will learn how life has changed over time.

Somerset Place is located at 2572 Lake Shore Road in Creswell, North Carolina. To make a reservation for a group tour, call (252) 797-4560 or send email to somerset@ncmail.net.