Poplar Grove, Historic plantation house in Scotts Hill, North Carolina
Poplar Grove is a 19th-century manor house in Pender County, North Carolina, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The main building features covered porches and sits alongside several original outbuildings, including a smokehouse, a kitchen shed, a carriage house, and worker housing.
The estate was built around 1850 and grew into one of the largest peanut plantations in North Carolina, relying heavily on enslaved labor. After the Civil War, the land was farmed by tenant workers, many of whom came from the same families who had previously been enslaved on the property.
The name Poplar Grove refers to the Foy family home, occupied by descendants of French Huguenots from 1795 until 1971. The 12-room Greek Revival house, built in the early 1850s by Joseph Mumford Foy, opened as a museum in 1980 under the Poplar Grove Foundation, Inc., and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as of July 16, 1979.
Poplar Grove stands by the Topsail Sound in Scotts Hill, near Wilmington in Pender County, North Carolina. The site is reached by road, and the house opened to the public as a museum in 1980 under the Poplar Grove Foundation, Inc.
The sources record that the house was once mistakenly attributed to a Nicholas Nixon; no Nixon tenant house stands on the grounds. The property passed to the Foy family, Huguenot descendants, in 1795 and stayed with them until 1971, and once stretched as far as Figure Eight Island.
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