Somerset Place

Somerset Place is a former plantation on the northern shore of Lake Phelps near Creswell, North Carolina, now within Pettigrew State Park. It operated from 1785 until 1865 and grew into one of the largest plantations in the antebellum Upper South. The surviving main house, built in a double pile plan, dates to 1830. The site was designated a North Carolina State Historic Site in 1969 and is operated today by the state's Department of Natural and Cultural Resources; the roughly seven acre core includes the plantation house, various outbuildings, reconstructed slave quarters, and a visitor center. In 1986, descendants of people enslaved at Somerset Place organized the Somerset Homecoming gathering, later documented by longtime site manager Dorothy Spruill Redford in a book of the same name. Somerset Place was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970.