Alston-DeGraffenried Plantation (Boundary Increase)

This addition to a plantation near Pittsboro, in Chatham County, North Carolina, brings in the working landscape around an early nineteenth-century house, built about 1810. The added area includes a nineteenth-century kitchen with a fieldstone chimney, a pig boiling pit, privies, a smokehouse, a log crib and a mule barn built around 1940 by a tenant, Frank Allston. Three ruined log cabins, probably dating from before the Civil War and thought to have housed enslaved people, lie north and east of the house. Old farm roads, one of which predates 1841, carried plantation goods toward markets, and about ten acres of fields are still farmed. The Alston family held the land from 1780, and descendants occupied it into the twentieth century. The plantation was large for the central Piedmont, with 123 enslaved people recorded in 1800. Receipts suggest shoemaking, weaving and sewing on site, and archaeologists see strong potential for further discoveries.