Historic Latta Plantation is a circa 1800 cotton plantation and living history farm, located within Latta Plantation Nature Preserve. Tours of the Latta home are guided, and tours of the grounds are self-guided.
Built in 1800, Latta Place was owned by James Latta, an immigrant from Northern Ireland. A successful traveling merchant through 1820, Mr. Latta then retired and turned his property into a cotton plantation consisting of 742 acres and 34 enslaved people. After Mr. Latta's death in 1837, his wife Jane sold the property to David Harry. In 1853, William Sample purchased the property, which was owned by the Sample family until 1922. Crescent Land and Timber, a subsidiary of Duke Power, then purchased the property because of its proximity to the Catawba River, and rented the home out to tenant farmers, until the house was abandoned in the 1950s.
In the 1970s, a group of citizens recognized the structural and historical significance of Latta Place and formed a private non-profit entity, Latta Place, Inc., to save and restore the property. With much diligence, and due in large part to the efforts of Jean Boggs, Latta Place, Inc. secured $110,000 from Mecklenburg County to restore the home, and opened it to the public in the mid 1970s. At that point Latta Place, Inc. donated the house and land to Mecklenburg County and recommended that the adjacent property be purchased by the county to form what is now Latta Plantation Nature Preserve.
Today, Historic Latta Plantation is still operated by Latta Place, Inc. In addition to daily tours, Latta offers 35 special events each year, five themed summer day camps, homeschool programs, workshops, educational field trips, and daily tours year-round. The 12,000 school children that visit the site annually are able to participate in unique interactive historical programming, visit rare and endangered breeds of historic livestock, see the process of growing short-staple cotton first hand, visit our honeybee exhibit, and much more!
