Placing, Bounding, Bordering, Territorializing: NRHP Criteria and Public Memory at North Carolina’s Somerset Place State Historic Site

Abstract

I define territory as embodied, relational, processual, and imaginative: power enacted upon and through place. In the following article, I use this generative definition of territory as a lens to interrogate how memory becomes placed and bounded at Somerset Place, a historic plantation site in North Carolina. Through archival research into the negotiations between two state government agencies on the legal status of Somerset Place between 1939-1965, as well as analysis of the gendered and racialized criteria for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places, I uncover how historic space was defined against recreational space – not only in the creation of Somerset Place, but in the heritage boom of the mid-twentieth century more broadly. In addition, by understanding territory as the historicized and ongoing enactment of power upon and through place, I reveal how formal and informal territories of public memory and public space are continuously defined, negotiated, and claimed.