Foscue and Simmons Plantations

Straddling US 17 near Pollocksville, this 1,353-acre district joins two intermarried families' plantations in Jones County. Simon Foscue, Jr., built the brick plantation house about 1821-1825, facing the New Bern Road. It is a two-story Federal-style dwelling on a side-hall plan, and the only brick house known in the county before the Civil War. About fifty years later, his granddaughter Christiana Foscue Simmons and her husband Amos built a one-story frame cottage across the road. The land runs from the road to the Trent River and includes cemeteries, tobacco barns, marl pits, farm roads and later houses. Woodlands west of the road have long been kept for timber, and woodlands in the east were used for naval stores. Cleared fields have grown corn, peas, soybeans and tobacco through slave, tenant and hired labor. The two plantations were reunited under the Foscue name in 1973, and the holding has stayed within one family for nearly two centuries.