Driving through the bucolic countryside of Hart County, I came upon this farm near Bowersville. As I slowly passed each structure and took in the scope of the property, I realized what an amazing place it was.
It has become rare to find this many structures still standing that were once the center of a vibrant working farm. I always appreciate the fact that there owners who recognize their importance and allow them to stand long past their original purpose has been fulfilled.
The farm looked much the same when photographed for an historic survey over 30 years ago, though the white paint was a bit brighter and one building has been lost.
Farms like these are the ones most people think of when they get nostalgic about our agrarian past. This may have been an larger operation than some, but it wasn’t a corporate farm running on government subsidies.
These buildings have been empty for many years, yet they’re still maintained as part of a larger property today. There’s still a farm here and the landscape is really something to behold.
Vanishing Georgia: Photographs by Brian Brown 
Marvelous! We “modern folk” just don’t know how hard life was in years past — before “modern conveniences” like running water, indoor plumbing, electric lights, etc.
A close friend of mine in 8th grade (many years ago) lived on a share-croppers’ farm south of Savannah, GA. We spent the night at each other’s houses, several times, in the mid-1960’s.
I will never forget the one winter weekend I spent there, when their heat source was a pot-bellied cast-iron stove in the kitchen. I woke up in the middle of the night to see this “glowing-red thing” lighting up the house. I initially thought “Aliens have landed!” (I was maybe 13 years old, and had never seen a pot-bellied stove “in action.” I was amazed.)
Fortunately, they did have “indoor plumbing” by then, so I did not have to find my way outside to an outhouse in the middle of the night!
A year or so later, when I went to a summer camp in NC, and was lucky enough to be chosen for a small group of older campers to spend a week on an archaeological dig near Canton, NC, we stayed at an old wooden house with a stream that ran underneath it.
That was our “storage place,” to put our milk, cheese, and sandwich meats in it, since we had no refrigerator. The running water kept them cold. That’s what “mountain folk” did, back then. (That water was very cold! In JULY,)
(The “refrigerator” in that old house was actually an old “ice box,” which I had never seen before. It was the kind that had a slot at the bottom where the “iceman” inserted a block of dry ice underneath the shelving section. A drip pan underneath collected the melted ice, and had to be emptied out every day. Early refrigeration! How startling to see it in person — as a 13-year old “city boy”.
I was quite surprised; but I was a young kid, back then. And things were more primitive, then, the further away one got from major cities.
We just do not appreciate how far we’ve come, in such a relatively short time.