Rain, relatives and ghosts.
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| The road to Somerset Place, Creswell |
On Wednesday, October 15, the day began with rain that had
moved in from the west during the night.
It seemed like the perfect time to visit Jimmy Fleming, owner of Flemz Market & Deli, local historian, writer and – of course – kin. Jimmy and I are related through the Parisher
line, and although we’d never met, I felt an immediate sense of
familiarity.
A few days before I met Jimmy, Debbie Armstrong Cobb had
passed along a death certificate for Olly Armstrong Voliva, A sister of Mary
Ann Armstrong. I had been trying for
years to discover, online, what their mother’s maiden name might have
been. She is everywhere listed as Armstrong but I’ve wondered if that was
truly her maiden name. The death
certificate noted Mariah Jarvis as Olly Armstrong’s mother, and Jimmy confirmed
that – although from the same source document.
One document does not a fact make, but what I found so interesting about
Jimmy’s genealogical insight was “Jarvis is not a Tyrrell County name – more like
Hyde or Dare. Even Chowan.”
So now I’m trying to learn more about Jarvis families in
those counties, looking for Mariah and possible Native roots among the Jarvis
families. (Jarvis is a surname that
appears in the Lost Colony project rosters).
After visiting with Jimmy, I drove west to Creswell in a
light drizzle to Somerset
Place, a former plantation on the shore of Lake Phelps in eastern
Washington County. The soft rain created
a kind of filtered experience. I was the
only visitor at the site, and without a rain jacket, walked around the grounds awkwardly
taking pictures while holding an umbrella.
I had read about the history of the site in Dorothy Spruill
Redford’s book, Somerset
Homecoming: Recovering a Lost Heritage but without a sense of the
landscape, nothing was quite as I’d expected.
I didn’t really understand the relationship of the built
environment to the lake, or how the cedar trees would look, or how I’d feel
when I saw the canals and the scope of that slave-made infrastructure.
Although I didn’t see the interior of the plantation house,
it was a gift to be there alone in the rain.
With the exception of a single parked truck near the office, there were
no people, no aspects of modernity other than signage to distract my attention
from the recreated physical world of 1860.
Humid, isolated, evocative, sad.
Haunting.
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| View through the trees toward shore of Lake Phelps, Somerset Place |
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| View of plantation house from path to cemetery, Somerset Place |
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| Curtains like ghosts in the windows of Collins/Pettigrew plantation house, Somerset Place |
