Lake Phelps, Somerset & the South County

Most of this brief is about Plymouth and its river. This chapter is about everything south of it — the flat, black-dirt farm country that runs down toward Lake Phelps, the tiny town of Creswell, and a landscape that feels less like a river town's backyard and more like the Midwest with cypress trees. If you are a land buyer, a hunter, or someone who wants acreage and true quiet, the south county is probably why you're reading this site at all. It also holds two of the most remarkable places in eastern North Carolina, one natural and one historical, and the history is heavy — I'll treat it that way.

Lake Phelps: The Strangest, Clearest Lake in Eastern North Carolina

Lake Phelps is a 16,600-acre lake in the county's southern reaches — the second-largest natural lake in North Carolina — and it behaves like no other water body in the region. It has no feeder streams: the lake is filled almost entirely by rainfall, which is why its water is unusually clear while nearly every other lake and stream on the coastal plain runs dark with tannins. It is also remarkably shallow — an average depth of about 4.5 feet and a maximum around 9 — so on a calm day you can see the sand bottom far from shore. Pettigrew State Park, established in 1936, wraps the lakeshore and offers a swimming area, boat access, camping, and flat, easy trails; local families have treated it as the county's beach for generations.

The lake's strangest feature is underwater. Archaeologists have documented 30 ancient dugout canoes in Lake Phelps — the largest group of canoes in the southeastern United States still found where they were made and used. Nineteen have been radiocarbon dated, ranging from roughly 2430 B.C. to A.D. 1400, and the largest measured about ~37 feet, among the longest known in the Southeast. The prevailing interpretation is that Algonquian peoples sank their cypress canoes in the shallow water to store them between seasons. Several are displayed at the park. It is a genuinely humbling thing to stand on a quiet shoreline and realize people were launching boats there four thousand years before the town of Plymouth existed.

Somerset Place: History Without the Gloss

On Lake Phelps' northern shore stands Somerset Place, a State Historic Site and one of the most significant — and most honestly interpreted — plantation sites in the South. The short version of a long history: in 1785, three investors including Josiah Collins I acquired roughly ~100,000 acres of swampland around the lake, and the Lake Company brought 80 enslaved Africans directly from West Africa, forcing them to dig a six-mile canal to drain and connect the land. Over the following eighty years, under three generations of the Collins family, more than 850 enslaved people lived and labored at Somerset, making it one of the largest plantations in North Carolina by the eve of the Civil War.

What sets the site apart is how it tells that story. Beginning in the 1980s, researcher Dorothy Spruill Redford — herself a descendant of people enslaved at Somerset — reconstructed the enslaved community's genealogy and, in 1986, organized the Somerset Homecoming, which brought more than 2,000 descendants back to the site. Today's interpretation centers the lives of the enslaved families alongside the Collins household rather than presenting a house tour with the labor airbrushed out. If you are considering buying in the south county, go. It is the deepest context you will get for why this landscape is shaped, drained, and farmed the way it is — the canals that made this farm belt were dug by enslaved hands, and the site says so plainly.

Creswell and the Farm Belt

Two practical notes on buying land down here, both of which I will expand on later in this brief. First, drainage is the whole ballgame. This is reclaimed wetland country; a tract's value depends on its canals and ditches actually functioning, on who maintains them, and on any drainage association or easement obligations that run with the land — get that documented, not assumed, before you offer. Wet years show you the truth about a field that dry-year showings hide. Second, much of the south county sits near vast protected acreage — Pettigrew State Park and the Pungo Unit of Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, which reaches into Washington County and supports one of the densest black bear populations ever documented. That is a gift if you hunt or watch wildlife, and a crop-damage and fencing reality if you farm. Either way, price it in with open eyes.

The south county will never be for everyone. It is dead quiet, far from services, and unapologetically agricultural. But if what you want is acres, wildlife, a clear lake with four thousand years of history at the bottom of it, and neighbors measured in fields rather than feet — this is some of the most interesting, least-shopped country in eastern North Carolina.