In the mid-1700s, Pemberton Hall Plantation was a prosperous eighteenth-century plantation that grew grain, tobacco, and flax, operated small industries, and shipped its products to colonial ports and to England. Colonel Isaac Handy (1706-1762) owned the plantation after buying the 970-acre undeveloped property from Joseph Pemberton in 1726, the same year he married Anne Dashiell, and the plantation remained in the Handy family for more than 100 years. Handy was a plantation owner, ship captain, merchant, justice of the peace, member of the Provincial Assembly, colonel in the Somerset County militia, and a founder of the Town of Salisbury. Pemberton Hall reflects Handy's social status as a wealthy Chesapeake Bay landowner in the colonial period. Pemberton Hall and the surrounding two acres are now owned and under restoration by the Pemberton Hall Foundation, Inc., while the surrounding grounds owned by Wicomico County form Pemberton Historical Park. The park's more than 250 acres are enclosed by three of the plantation's original 1750 boundaries, preserving a rare historic landscape that looks much as it did when it was maintained by scythes, sickles, and grazing animals, with five miles of nature trails through tidal and fresh water wetlands, freshwater ponds, a river island, forests, and meadows.
