Qualla: Cherry Hill Plantation

Cherry Hill Plantation: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ninety enslaved people lived on this 2,000-acre estate when the main house was finished around 1850. They lived in fourteen cabins that no longer exist. The Greek Revival house with its ogee-arched porch still stands, beautifully preserved, and twice a year a small audience comes to hear a pianist or violinist play in the front hall. The acoustics are extraordinary. The story Cherry Hill chooses to tell about itself focuses on those concerts, the gem-quality amethyst in the soil beneath the foundation, and the careful Italianate detailing of the porch trefoil. The story Cherry Hill more rarely tells is about ninety people whose names mostly didn't survive into the deed books, and whose work built everything visitors now come to admire.

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Cherry Hill Plantation: Ninety People in Fourteen Cabins

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 unimprov...

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Cherry Hill Plantation: Marina Williams and a House of Concerts

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Coun...

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Cherry Hill Plantation: Edgar Thorne's Long Stewardship

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Found...

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Cherry Hill Plantation: Listening with Full Attention

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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