Tenant Farmhouses, Houston County

This row of four surviving tenant houses in southern Houston County is an important landmark of the sharecropping era. Interestingly, three different designs are represented among them. On the largest working farms, tenant houses were often located adjacent to one another in rows. Very few examples of this configuration survive today. And while it’s obvious that these won’t be around much longer, I admire the landowners who have kept them as reminders of the history. These likely date to the early 20th century.

The first two pictured are simple saddlebags.

This board-and-batten example is larger than the others and has chimneys on each end.

My favorite of the four was this hip-roofed saddlebag with false-brick siding. In the South, we generally refer to this type of siding as “tar paper”.