This has been a bit of a mystery to me since I first photographed it. It contains steps and a kiln but is shorter than any tobacco barn I’ve ever seen. Had it not contained the normal elements of a tobacco barn, I would have guessed it to be a smokehouse.
I grew up working in tobacco barns like this one and always liked the log barns with skinned pole tiers better than the rough sawn two-by-fours. They were easier on the feet– especially if one was barefoot. Most barns of that era had four rooms that were each four feet wide. Green tobacco leaves were strung on tobacco sticks of 54 inches. That allowed them to fit across a tier, leaving a few inches on each end of the sick for the space taken by the portion that rested on the tier. Mule skinners, tobacco tar, and log barns were some of the trade marks of Southeast Georgia farming in the first half of the twentieth century.