Qualla: Long Grass Plantation

Long Grass Plantation: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the 1950s the Army Corps of Engineers closed John H. Kerr Dam and watched the Roanoke River back up across Mecklenburg County, Virginia. The water swallowed roads, foundations, the family seat at Ivy Hill, and most of the 2,000 acres of Long Grass Plantation. What survived is twenty-seven acres of high ground - the main house, the ice house, the smokehouse, the schoolhouse, the kitchen and laundry, two tobacco barns, and a packhouse - and a flooded landscape underneath that occasionally reveals itself when the lake is drawn down for maintenance. Tarry's old mill foundations surface then, along with the ferry landing and the slave quarters that the Civil War-era map placed nowhere near the big house.

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Long Grass Plantation: The Enslaved Community

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A Civil War-period map of Long Grass shows that Tarry family's slave quarters were not close to the main house. The house servants stayed in the house. The field hands lived in cabins farther out, in the area now roughly between the junction of Eppes Fork Road and Mill Creek Road...

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Long Grass Plantation: The House That Holt Built

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The oldest part of Long Grass is a small hall-and-parlor house from around 1797 that already stood on the land when George Tarry arrived. The structure grew in four major waves. In 1831-32 Jacob W. Holt added a two-story, three-bay Greek Revival front, connected to the original b...

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Long Grass Plantation: Buildings the Water Spared

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The most striking surviving outbuilding is the c. 1832 ice house - a two-story wood frame structure with a 14-foot ice pit. Workers harvested ice each winter from shallow ponds across the plantation and packed it into the pit with alternating layers of sawdust, building up cold s...

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Long Grass Plantation: The Constitution Oak and What the Lake Reveals

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Planted in the front yard is a Burr Oak called the Constitution Oak, given as a remembrance gift to George Patrick Tarry when he served as a delegate from Mecklenburg County to the Virginia constitutional convention of 1901-02. Burr Oak grows slowly and is unusual in Virginia. In...

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