Cherry Grove Plantation

About this property

Cherry Grove Plantation is a historic plantation in Natchez, Mississippi. It is located in southeast Natchez, Mississippi, in Adams County, on Second Creek. The mansion was built by Pierre Surget (1731-1796), a French planter, in 1788, over 2,500 acres of an English land grant, granted to him by the Spanish government. As such, it is one of the earliest private residences in Natchez. After his death, his widow Catharine (Hubbard) Surget expanded the grounds of the property. By 1850, the house belonged to their son James Pierre Surget, with sixteen house servants in residence. Cherry Grove has been in the continuous ownership of the same family since 1788 and has remained always a working plantation. It remains in the family of Surget descendants. Cherry Grove Plantation is today one of the best preserved and most complete plantation complexes in the Natchez area. The original plantation residence constructed by Pierre Surget and his wife Catharine burned in the mid-nineteenth century, and the present picturesque and architecturally significant residence was constructed about 1865 by Pierre Surget's grandson James Surget, Jr. The form of the house, which consists of a residence constructed upon a fully raised basement with a central five-bay block and flanking single-bay wings, has the regionally early single-pile plan with rear "cabinet" rooms enclosing each end of a rear gallery recessed under the rear slope of the roof. Likewise, the facade of the central block features a gallery that is recessed under the front slope of the roof. These features suggest the possibility that the present house may have taken its basic form from the earlier house which burned. The original flanking wings with octagonal bays and gable-end balconies represent the concession of the builder to the popular taste of the 1860s. The collection of plantation outbuildings is exceptional and includes an unusual tenpin frame alley building with attached late-nineteenth century gymnasium, smoke house, detached kitchen building, corn crib, stables, privy, sheep stalls, and barns. Hand-hewn cypress troughs for feeding and watering the stock are rare plantation survivals, and the plantation cemetery containing the graves of Pierre and Catharine Surget and their descendants is located within sight of the main dwelling house. The plantation gains added significance from its long history of family ownership. Pierre Surget, originally a seaman by trade, was the patriarch of the Surget family in Natchez, a family that formed one of the largest planting dynasties in the entire South. Pierre's son Frank was described by one contemporary historian as the most extensive landholder and successful planter in Mississippi.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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