This old farmhouse was located in the southwestern part of Irwin County, off Five Bridge Road, and I drove past it for many years wondering if it would survive, and who lived here and made it a home. This photograph from my archives dates to 2012, and was made in the winter, because the house was almost completely hidden by vegetation during the spring and summer months. I don’t know its fate but suspect it is gone.
This saddlebag house has an attached wing. If true to the form, it originally had two front doors. I photographed it in 2012 in the Satilla Church area and am not sure if it’s still standing.
Holt Baptist Church is one of several historic congregations in the Holt community. It was founded by George Washington Freeman (1855-1930) and Susan Amanda House Freeman (1863-1968) in 1916. It’s likely the church building was constructed around this time. The Freemans came to Irwin County from Wilkes County. I believe Mrs. Freeman was a native of Lincoln County.
This house was the center of a small farm that was kept up for many years, even when no one lived here. The photograph dates to 2010; the house was recently demolished. There are still barns on the property, painted bright red like the house.
A classic late-19th century vernacular house, this example near Lands Crossing is yet another illustration of the expansion of the utilitarian central hallway form. A shed room was added at the rear of the structure and another wing was attached, perhaps a kitchen. I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t logs beneath the siding. The windows bordering the door are a bit unusual. One would expect to find full-length sidelights instead. I suspect this is a later modification, done for a practical reason. It’s one of the nicest and oldest examples of this house type in Irwin County.
This is located near the Riverbend community, and I’ve stopped many times over the years to photograph it. The “striped’ roof always catches my eye. With so many photographs, I don’t know why I’ve never published it, but I’m finding quite a few Irwin County images as I re-edit posts, and perhaps it got overlooked. I believe Diana Griffin identified it for me on social media years ago, but since I’m not on those spaces much anymore, I don’t have access to that information. It is a double-pen house, indicated by the two front doors, and in that respect a relatively rare form. Double-pen houses are most often associated with tenancy, but not always. A shed room at the rear of the house is also visible, which was a common amendment to these types of structures.
I wish the quality of these images were better, but this is a heavily shaded location and I had to settle for what I could get. These photographs date to 2012 so I’m not certain this house is still extant. But what a great house it is, a textbook example of the workhorse of the tenant farm era, the single-pen cottage. This one had a chimney that would have cost more than the house, undoubtedly. It served its purpose of shelter and warmth, but gave little comfort otherwise. Houses of this type were often built in rows, on a larger farm, reminiscent of the arrangement of slave dwellings on earlier plantations. Of course, a small farmer may have only had one or two such houses on his property. I know nothing about this one, except that I think it was worth documenting.
I photographed this little house numerous times over the years and it finally collapsed in 2018. There was a large shed room that ran across the back side and continued into a small wing, visible behind the tree at right, but it was essentially a classic example of the hall and parlor style often associated with tenant housing. I like to imagine it in its younger days, when someone took care of it and called it home.
I first photographed this house in 2001 and it was still standing in 2015. I haven’t driven past it in a few years and am not sure if it survives. Typical of many tenant houses, it was of board-and-batten construction and had a small shed room at the back. These small utilitarian spaces were often associated with farming and/or turpentining and supported large families in many cases. It’s hard to imagine what life must have been like in such a small space without any of the modern conveniences.
I have never been able to identify this early-20th-century structure, located in the extreme eastern section of Ben Hill County, near Macedonia Baptist Church. Obviously, it has been used as a barn for many years, but the architecture would suggest some other original purpose. My best guess is that it was a schoolhouse, but it could have also been a church or even a store. The photograph dates to circa 2012, and I’m not sure if the building is still standing.