When the present building was constructed around 1850 for Marina Priscilla Williams, ninety enslaved people lived on the Cherry Hill estate. They were housed in fourteen slave cabins on the property. The estate worked 500 acres of improved land and another 1,500 acres of unimproved timber and pasture. The cabins are gone now. The white-frame main house, with its Greek Revival proportions and ornate Italianate and Gothic Revival flourishes, survives intact. The architectural historians who documented the plantation in the late twentieth century focused on the trefoil-themed porch creating an ogee arch, the doors painted to mimic rosewood, the baseboards painted to resemble gray and black marble. They wrote less about the fourteen cabins. By the time anyone was writing it down, the cabins were already gone, and so were most of the names of the people who had lived in them.

Cherry Hill stands within Inez, a community that is now part of Warrenton in Warren County, in the Roanoke River basin near the Virginia border. The Alston family connected to several other Warren County plantations - Myrtle Lawn and Tusculum - and to plantations in Franklin County named Linwood Farms, Rocky Hill, and Vine Hill. John A. Waddell, the architect of Cherry Hill, had trained with builder Jacob W. Holt of Warrenton, who shaped the regional style by blending the new Italianate and Gothic Revival idioms with the older Greek Revival. The house was designed for music. The piano sat in the front hall, the first thing a visitor saw. The axial floor plan opened two equal-sized rooms onto the central hall so guests could overflow toward the music. Two staircases climbed from the hall - one for women in hooped dresses, one for men. A guest performer stayed upstairs in the north bedroom the night before a concert.

Concerts at Cherry Hill, as a public series, did not begin until a man named Edgar Thorne acquired the house in the 1960s. Thorne bought out the other owners, gradually consolidating the property, and in 1982 deeded the house and fourteen acres to the Cherry Hill Historical Foundation. He continued to live there with his sister until her death in 1998. The Cherry Hill Concert Series, which he established, ran six concerts a year - three in fall, three in spring - because the unheated, un-air-conditioned house could not host audiences in summer or deep winter. The grand piano in the front hall was replaced in 2001. Thorne died in 2004. The foundation has continued his vision, hosting between 35 and 60 guests per concert, keeping the house as close to its original state as practical, while gradually adding interpretation that acknowledges the people who built it.

A concert at Cherry Hill is a strange and beautiful experience. The pianist sits in the front hall. Listeners sit in chairs in the flanking rooms, in the hall itself, on the lower steps of the women's staircase to the north, on the steps of the men's staircase to the south if the audience overflows. The light is from windows, then from candles and lamps as evening comes on. The music is unmediated by amplification. Marina Alston's downstairs master bedroom is still there. The two closets built inside the room - unusual for the period - are still there. And around all of it, the house keeps the silence of the fourteen cabins that no longer exist, and of the ninety people whose lives made every detail of the place possible. Honest listening means hearing both the music and the silence.