I photographed this house in 2013 and have since lost the location. I would be surprised it it’s still standing. It’s included in my Lee County files, so I presume that’s where it was located. It’s a nice single-pen tenant house, which was expanded a couple of times throughout its history. Like many such uninsulated dwellings, it was later covered with tar paper to help with temperature control. If anyone knows its whereabouts or fate, please get in touch.
I made this photograph on 17 June 2009 and the image got lost in my archives, until now. I don’t recall where in Randolph County this structure was located, but it was one of my early favorites. I believe it was somewhere between Benevolence and the now demolished Hour of Prayer Church, if that helps anyone in pinpointing its whereabouts. The single-pen style, while equally distributed among white and black laborers, is sometimes referred to as “Cracker”. It’s one of Georgia’s most widespread [and endangered] rural housing types of the late 19th and early 20th century and is often associated with tenancy, which in Georgia usually meant farming or turpentining. It was also popular in textile mill villages. As seen on this example, most single-pen cottages featured a shed room at the rear.
This is located near a large farm, so I’m identifying it as a tenant house. Many such residences became rental properties after the sharecropping era and as they became too expensive to modernize, were abandoned. The gable front form was a slight upgrade from the standard shotgun house, affording a little more space for hardworking families who labored nearby. The addition of a canopy over the porch was certainly an improvement.
The gabled-ell or winged gable form is one of the most common of the vernacular house types of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in rural Georgia. Most of these originated as small central hallway or hall-and-parlor houses and were expanded as a family’s needs required more space.
This photo was made in 2015 and I believe it was on Nolan Store Road. I’m not sure if it was near the Nolan Plantation, though.
I never get tired of finding houses like this because, more than any white-columned mansion, they represent the history that was reality for most Georgians a century ago .
Though it’s hard to see through the bamboo, this small house is a nice example of the hall and parlor form in the tenant context. When I stopped to make the photograph, its current residents, a wake of buzzards, was perched all along the rooftop. They flew away as soon as I opened the car door.
This is one of my favorite styles of tenant housing, and it’s quite rare these days. These small hip roof cottages just have more aesthetic appeal than the average tenant house and should be considered a critically endangered resource.
This tenant house, located beside the Burton Brooks Orchard, was likely once part of the I. C. Williams farm.
This house has three front doors, suggesting it was likely a tenant property.