Adelphia Plantation also called the Garrett-Wiggins House or the Garrett-Wiggins-Brown House, is a historic

plantation house A plantation house is the main house of a plantation, often a substantial farmhouse, which often serves as a symbol for the plantation as a whole. Plantation houses in the Southern United States and in other areas are known as quite grand and e ...

Edgecombe County, North Carolina Edgecombe County is a county located in the U.S. state of North Carolina. As of the 2020 census, the population was 48,900. Its county seat is Tarboro. Edgecombe County is part of the Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Metropolitan Statistical Area ...

near the towns of Tarboro and Pinetops. The

Italianate style The Italianate style was a distinct 19th-century phase in the history of Classical architecture. Like Palladianism and Neoclassical architecture, Neoclassicism, the Italianate style drew its inspiration from the models and architectural vocabular ...

house was built in 1854 for Joseph John Garrett.

History

Adelphia Plantation was built in 1854 in

for Dr. Joseph John Garrett, a local physician. The house, located north of the town of Pinetops and south of the town of Tarboro, was possibly designed by the architect George Lipscombe. It was built in the

and some of the designs used for ornamentation may have come from William Ranlett's 1847 pattern book ''The Architect''. The house is also known as the Garrett-Wiggins House and the Garrett-Wiggins-Brown House. The plantation also includes a doctor's office and a two-story wood-sided tobacco packhouse built in 1880 by Tom Battle, a carpenter and former slave on the plantation. Battle's family continued to work as

sharecroppers Sharecropping is a legal arrangement with regard to agricultural land in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land. Sharecropping has a long history and there are a wide range ...

at Adelphia. There are also gardens on the property. Adelphia Plantation has been owned by the Wiggins-Brown family since 1881. John Lawrance Wiggins, a local

magistrate The term magistrate is used in a variety of systems of governments and laws to refer to a civilian officer who administers the law. In ancient Rome, a ''magistratus'' was one of the highest ranking government officers, and possessed both judici ...

, owned the house until his death in 1897, when it passed to his heirs. Wiggins was the father of Fred Wiggins, Nannie Elizabeth Wiggins, and Octavia Josephine Wiggins. In the 1990s, the house was inherited by photographer and city planner Watson Brown. Brown, who inherited the plantation from his aunt, renovated the house. Brown is the fifth generation of his family to live at Adelphia. In August 2011, winds from

Hurricane Irene Hurricane Irene was a large and destructive tropical cyclone which affected much of the Caribbean and East Coast of the United States during late August 2011. The ninth named storm, first hurricane, and first major hurricane of the 2011 Atl ...

caused an 125-year-old oak tree to fall on the grounds of Adelphia.

References

{{authority control Houses completed in 1854 Houses in Edgecombe County, North Carolina Italianate architecture in North Carolina Plantation houses in North Carolina