Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History

5 “History as Tourist Bait”: Inventing Somerset Place State Historic Site, 1939–1969

113 5 “History as Tourist Bait” Inventing Somerset Place State Historic Site, 1939–1969 Alisa Y. Harrison At two o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday, September 6, 1969, in a ceremony “on fresh cut greens,” “under the spreading cypress trees that have shaded the plantation for almost 200 years,” Somerset Place, once a large and productive plantation, was dedicated North Carolina’s fourteenth state historic site.1 The dedication was polished and refined, “in the tradition of Somerset’s gracious style of living,” featuring a marching band, invited speakers, and catered refreshments.2 The local paper covered the event with a front-page story, noting that Somerset Place State Historic Site stood for “a tangible part of society and life that flourished over 150 years ago.” It dubbed the years from 1830 to 1860—the period the site represented—as Somerset’s “happiest time,” when the plantation located in the state’s northeastern Albemarle region “was a social center for a reading club, parties, [and] fancy-dressed balls.”3 By the time of the dedication, state authorities had long been convinced that the antebellum era was the natural period for Somerset to represent, and they had spent several decades developing the site to emphasize its glory days as a center of high society, a place that attracted people seeking culture and refinement. By mimicking Somerset’s halcyon days when it was ruled by the planter Josiah Collins III, one of the “lords of Lake Phelps,” the dedication reinforced the state’s decision to interpret the site in terms of dominant memories of the Old South.4 Guests attended the formal ribbon-cutting ceremony , but they also spent time lounging on the manicured lawn, enjoying food and drinks in the mansion, and hunting in the forests surrounding 114 Inventing Somerset Place State Historic Site, 1939–1969 the living compound, experiencing a lifestyle that organizers intended to connect them in some way with the long-gone plantation aristocracy. In isolation from both the larger context of life on an antebellum plantation —which they were meant to represent—and from 1960s North Carolina —from which they were meant to give attendees a break—the scheduled activities allowed those who came to celebrate Somerset’s opening to stake a personal and immediate claim on a romantic and honorable, but indeed mythological, southern past.5 The guests invited to Somerset’s dedication made an automatic connection between the site and a widely shared vision of the Old South that cast the planter as a benevolent hero and plantation society as gracious and leisurely, and emphasized the productivity of a slave society while simultaneously erasing the enslaved. But that narrative, which seemed so obvious in September 1969, in fact took decades of work to produce at Somerset Place, and grew in response to both ideological and economic factors. North Carolina had purchased Somerset thirty years earlier as part of Pettigrew State Park, which the state’s Department of Conservation and Development established in Washington and Tyrrell Counties. State officials Figure 5.1. Josiah Collins III Family Home, Somerset Place State Historic Site, North Carolina. (Photograph courtesy of the author.) Alisa Y. Harrison 115 and local observers believed that the combination of distinct historical and natural features at the park would draw visitors to the Albemarle, and they committed to developing the historic core of the plantation in order to capitalize on the area’s increasingly profitable tourism industry. Somerset’s promise for tourism seemed clear, as it was already a popular destination for whites from the surrounding counties, who held family picnics, school outings, community events, and church gatherings on the vast lawn and explored the mansion, barn, and other outbuildings at will. Indeed, long before the state showed any interest in the site, groups of white North Carolinians had already begun to weave Somerset’s fabled history into their contemporary landscape and lives. As soon as the Collins family dynasty collapsed after the Civil War, local people’s memories of the past, acted out in a variety of ways at the plantation, enabled the site to maintain its grand antebellum legacy.6 Before the war, the middle- and working-class whites from the counties around Somerset who took over from planter and slaves as the site’s primary users had expressed contempt for Collins and his planter colleagues. In the decades that followed, however , they used the site to claim an imagined...