Est. 1830 · Antebellum Plantation · Slavery History · State Historic Site · Genealogical Reunification
Somerset Place was established in 1785 by Josiah Collins, a New England-born merchant who organized a syndicate to drain and develop more than 100,000 acres of swamp and forest along Lake Phelps. The plantation produced rice, corn, wheat, and lumber, and grew over the next several generations into one of the most prosperous and largest agricultural operations in the antebellum Upper South.
The Collins family residence, built in 1830 by Josiah Collins III, anchored a complex that included a hospital, a chapel, a sawmill, and dozens of structures associated with the labor of the enslaved community. By 1860, more than 300 enslaved people lived at Somerset, placing it among only four North Carolina plantations of that scale. Over the eighty years the plantation operated, more than 800 individuals were held in bondage on the property.
Following the Civil War, the Collins family lost the plantation, and the land passed through several hands before being acquired by the State of North Carolina. Reconstruction efforts in the late twentieth century rebuilt several outbuildings, including two homes from the enslaved community and the plantation hospital, supporting an interpretive program that places the lives of enslaved residents at the center of the visitor experience. Somerset Place is also notable for the work of historian Dorothy Spruill Redford, whose research reunited descendants of Somerset's enslaved families and shaped the modern site's interpretation.
The visitor center contains exhibits on antebellum North Carolina, the Collins household, and the genealogical research that recovered the names and stories of those who lived in bondage at Somerset.
Sources
- https://historicsites.nc.gov/all-sites/somerset-place
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_Place
- https://www.ncpedia.org/somerset-place
- https://ncblackheritagetour.com/historic_site/somerset-place-state-historic-site/
ApparitionsPhantom footstepsOrbsDisembodied screaming
The folklore around Somerset Place centers on a single, durable image: a woman heard weeping for a child lost to the canal water. The story, as it appears in multiple regional ghost-story collections, holds that one of the Collins women lost a young son who drowned in an irrigation canal serving the plantation's rice operations, and that her grief has lingered on the property.
Visitor accounts collected by aggregator sites describe footsteps that fall in time with one's own along the wooded paths, the sensation of being followed near the main house, and orbs appearing in photographs taken during tours. None of these phenomena have been documented in formal investigation reports.
Notably, available sources frame Somerset's haunting as house-and-family rather than slavery-related. This is itself a sociologically interesting choice: a plantation where more than 800 people were held in bondage carries, in popular folklore, a ghost story about the white family's grief. The North Carolina Historic Sites interpretive program does not promote paranormal claims, and the lore exists almost entirely outside the official site narrative.
Notable Entities
The Lady of the House
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