I often run across old farmhouses like this one, exposed after a pine plantation has been clear-cut.
Abandoned Farmhouse, Screven County
Vanishing Georgia: Photographs by Brian Brown
Since 2008. A visual survey of Georgia's historic architecture and culture. 9,000 locations. 30,000 images.
Only if those walls could talk….many stories to tell at each place …thrust good times and difficult ones.
How do you find these houses to photograph, do you just wonder around in the woods a lot looking for photo shots? Sad house & probably unhappy stories left inside. Nonetheless the sad house looks like it has provided temporary shelter to person/persons down on their luck at one time or another. Great picture.
Linda, I generally just ride around on backroads, between larger towns and find them. They’re often concentrated near old churches and crossroads stores that are just names on maps. Unless they are very abandoned, I generally never go inside, but sometimes I point my camera in a door or window.
I can imagine my great, great grandfather (1901), his wife (1905) and seven children living here and farming in the 1930’s. My grandfather was a negro, farmer who owned a little land and about 25 cattle in Millhaven according to census and land records. He and his wife would have had a 7th grade education, but their children would have gone to school and been raised in nearby churches. They would not have had a telephone, and a child or two would have died young. It would have been a hard, but honest living. I marvel at these pictures and yearn to learn more about the true lives and history of the people who lived there. This is not sad, it’s history.
So sad.
I always wonder about the people who lived in these old houses… How did they feel when they first moved in? What were their lives like when they lived there? Where did they go? …
It looks as though there’s a lot of good wood that could be repurposed.
I have seen this happen in Fitzgerald, GA a lot. The parents pass on, their kids moved away years ago and have no interest in their parents old property or their things. They bury their parents lock up their home and go back to wherever they are living. Usually the property is sold by the city for property tax due. This house just happen to be in the country.
Abandoned is not the word — looks like they left in a hurry.
Makes you wonder what happened to the last tenant.