Somerset Place

Somerset Place began with a slave ship fitted out for the purpose. In 1784 Josiah Collins's Lake Company agreed to drain and farm 100,000 swampy acres on Lake Phelps — and Collins went to Boston to outfit the Camden, which returned from West Africa in June 1786 with about eighty captive Africans. Their first labor was the six-mile canal from lake to river, dug by hand through the swamp. Of the original 167 enslaved workers, only 113 survived to the 1790 census — the swamp was converted to plantation at that price.

By 1860 Somerset was one of the Upper South's largest plantations — 861 enslaved people over its lifetime, rice and wheat and lumber cut by enslaved and free millwrights, run by overseers while the Collinses lived across the sound in Edenton. The state's interpretation names the community the census didn't: Guinea Jack and Fanny from West Africa; Dave Phelps and Dinah Baum; Abagail, orphaned at six, who kept her family together through the war and came back to Somerset free in 1865.

The freed families left by the end of 1865, and the plantation never again turned a profit — it could not run without the labor it had stolen. The house and six buildings went into Pettigrew State Park in 1939 and became a state historic site in 1969 — one of two North Carolina plantations preserved by the state, interpreted now around the named enslaved community rather than the house.

Somerset Place is the archive's Lake Phelps file — the 100,000-acre plantation carved from swamp by 861 enslaved people over eighty years, where the state now tells the community's story by name.