To Grandmother's House We Go

Mary and Aunty Evil expressed a curiosity several posts ago about our farms. So I thought I'd share a few photos taken between our house and mothers (a twenty mile or so distance). These are scattered along the roadsides. Old wooden barns, sheds and outbuildings. Nature is taking them back over. Rusted tin tops their wooden beams, vines are reclaiming the timbers... but they are, I think, beautiful. Everytime I see one, it makes me wonder who built it? What was their daily life like? 80, 90 or 100 years ago...
We live on a dirt road. Advantage: little traffic. Disadvantage: no road crew to maintain it.
It's not Tara from Gone with the Wind. This type of farm house is actually far more common than the huge, column graced homes of the movies. A wrap-around porch, chimneys on either side of the house. It gets hot here and the goal of heating/cooking would have been to let the heat escape quickly, instead of hoarding it as would be an advantage in a colder climate, where it would be more common to see a centrally placed heating source and chimney. Hallways typically run straight through the center of the house, from the front porch to the back and are called breezeways, as they let cool air flow through the house.
Cotton. Goes through cycles of popularity based on the soil. Cotton is best suited for growing in rocky, sandy soil. You can tell from our dirt roads, that we don't have rich soil. When I was younger, cotton was not THE crop that it is today and was in the 1950s when my parents were growing up. The majority of our local fields are planted in cotton today.
Another gorgeous, fading barn. If you peer in closely, you can see a modern tractor underneath the eaves. Old sheds and barns are still used to shelter tractors, hay bales, wire, etc.