Hidden Tenant Farmer's Cabin Found in the Georgia Woods!

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]This used to be a pecan orchard on a farm many years ago, but now the wisteria and the privet hedge are taking it over and I can't even see what I'm looking for.

[00:00:27]There it is.

[00:00:45]>> [music] [music] >> So, this is an old tenant farmer cabin.

[00:01:03]It used to be the home [music] for someone who worked on this old farm.

[00:01:24]>> [music] >> I started to go in through the back, but maybe we should go in the front door.

[00:01:43]Well, front door looks a little hard to get to.

[00:01:59]Eat.

[00:02:08]>> It's board and batten siding.

[00:02:11]This thing was definitely built post 19 hundreds.

[00:02:17]Looking at the size of the nails.

[00:02:20]Look at this beaded board here.

[00:02:23]Probably maybe depression era.

[00:02:27]Let's uh let's keep investigating.

[00:02:41]So, they used cardboard as insulation in here.

[00:02:47]No interior walls.

[00:02:51]At least that are left, but it looks like yeah, there was never interior walls in here, but you can see where they had stuff nailed to the wall.

[00:03:08]Look at that.

[00:03:14]Is that was that hand drawn on there?

[00:03:18]Or was that printed on there? I guess it was printed some kind of paper.

[00:03:27]Oh, can you imagine what life must have been like in this house.

[00:03:38]All right, layers of wallpaper.

[00:03:45]Layers of who knows what on the floor.

[00:04:02]>> Someone was doing some math on this wall.

[00:04:11]It's just the spiders calling it home now.

[00:04:18]So, one thing is there's only half a house here.

[00:04:24]Today, we shouldn't be walking outside, but the other half of this house is just rotted away.

[00:04:30]There's the roof.

[00:04:32]There's a beam over there.

[00:04:37]But, it's just gone.

[00:04:56]The birds are also calling it home.

[00:05:40]Oh, man, we don't want to stand under that. That's that is a proper death trap.

[00:05:47]What we can learn from this is that they used to have a stove back here.

[00:05:53]And there's the chimney for it.

[00:05:55]But look, the board that was once holding it up is rotted away.

[00:06:02]It's just one board holding it now.

[00:06:05]Now, let's not walk anywhere near that.

[00:06:17]So, this was a porch that was closed in. I was trying to figure out maybe I don't know, maybe the porch itself was added on.

[00:06:32]I think the porch itself was added on at some point.

[00:06:39]Rather than be being an original porch that was just closed in. But we have an outside wall of the house right here, board and batten.

[00:06:50]Converted into a room, I guess a kitchen.

[00:07:03]More cardboard on the walls over here.

[00:07:09]And then that door to nowhere.

[00:07:13]Day and night.

[00:08:06]>> Almost looks like they had kind of a transom window of some form.

[00:08:15]Just how crudely built these door openings are.

[00:08:19]And then the old fireplace.

[00:08:22]Now, I see some really interesting things going on here.

[00:08:29]This is um partly built with old plantation bricks, but I also see newer bricks in here, too.

[00:08:39]See, this is a newer brick.

[00:08:41]That's going to be of the type that you would get, you know, sort of 1870s, '80s, early 1900s.

[00:08:50]>> [sighs and gasps] >> I almost touched it.

[00:08:53]This, on the other hand, is a plantation brick.

[00:09:00]This is, you know, what would have been made on the local plantations out of the local red clay.

[00:09:12]So, this is anywhere from 1820s to, well, the end of the plantation era.

[00:09:18]So, it's a little too old for this house.

[00:09:22]Unless unless this chimney is older than the house.

[00:09:30]We need to look at it outside.

[00:09:34]Look at this first. This is kind of neat and sad at the same time.

[00:09:41]This is a piece of their firewood still waiting to uh to be used to keep these folks warm.

[00:09:55]That is a really creepy-looking spider.

[00:10:01]I don't want to know what kind of spider built that web. Look how thick it is.

[00:10:15]Hm.

[00:10:16]This chimney must have been built with leftovers from the plantation era because it's a mixture of plantation brick. Is that a thumb print in there?

[00:10:29]Sometimes you'll find this plantation brick with a thumb print in it often left by a uh person who was likely enslaved who was making it. Anyway, this is built with a combination of plantation era brick which we see here and modern brick here.

[00:10:51]I was actually looking to see if the base of the chimney was older than than the house and maybe they just redid the top part of it.

[00:11:02]But this is mostly plantation brick on the bottom.

[00:11:14]And then right about here we start getting that more modern brick.

[00:11:21]But then it's plantation brick and modern brick. It's It's interesting. But you know, it's not like whoever was building these tenant houses was spending a lot of money on them.

[00:11:30]They were to serve one purpose, to provide shelter, and that's it. Shelter for the tenant farmers who were working for whoever owned the farm on the farms.

[00:11:45]They weren't designed with any kind of anything other than that. And it was shelter at the most basic usage of the word.

[00:11:59]Cuz they didn't do much else other than that.

[00:12:07]But there were people who lived in them and called them home regardless and tried to make them a home. Now, look at this.

[00:12:14]Look how the chimney is away from the house.

[00:12:18]And I'm trying to tell whether it's just falling away from the house or whether it just wasn't a good fit when it was first built.

[00:12:30]And I can't tell.

[00:12:35]I'm still wondering if this chimney was not here first and then this house built, but there's things that just don't make sense with that.

[00:12:50]Because all of that up there and this part is brickyard brick.

[00:12:58]That's brickyard brick for the most part. That is brickyard brick. That is brickyard brick.

[00:13:04]But this that's plantation era brick.

[00:13:08]And then from there down it's plantation era brick.

[00:13:17]But at the very base it's all plantation brick.

[00:13:24]Starting to think that this chimney was here and it was rebuilt partly and uh reused for this tenant house here.

[00:13:39]Look at this. Look at the mortar for one down here.

[00:13:44]It's missing a lot of it towards the bottom. But it seems to be done I don't know.

[00:13:53]It looks a little different up here.

[00:14:02]See, I think, and I'm not sure, but I think that that is a newer mortar than that right there. This whole thing was built from material that came from somewhere else.

[00:14:17]So, this is board and batten.

[00:14:19]Just missing the battens for the most part. There's one. Really really wide battens.

[00:14:25]But if you look up there and then right there you see that nail that's been pounded over?

[00:14:35]That is a square nail.

[00:14:39]See, the round nails are used in the construction, but this already had square nails in it.

[00:14:45]There's one right there.

[00:14:49]So, this already had square nails in it.

[00:14:53]And then they they just kind of pounded them over. Didn't pull them out for whatever reason, but just pounded them over.

[00:15:03]And built this structure with round nails.

[00:15:10]And looking at the round nails, too, they look um you know, post post-1900s round nails.

[00:15:19]Not the real early ones, but um yeah.

[00:15:24]It really makes me wonder what this was built from. Uh could it have been uh housing for enslaved people that was torn down and then reused to build a tenant farmer house or you know, any any other kind of old plantation building that was repurposed?

[00:15:46]This is interesting. This is very very interesting.

[00:15:57]There's another plantation era brick that was just on the ground.

[00:16:05]See, so when brick yards became common and the railroads ran through, this plantation brick really fell out of favor.

[00:16:12]So, the house is on fieldstone pillars.

[00:16:18]The main beam under this house is also reused from something else.

[00:16:24]It's It's definitely hand-hewn.

[00:16:27]It's got some notches in it.

[00:16:35]This would be for the porch section, though. So, a section that's not original to the house. I can see that it was added on now.

[00:16:58]That's crazy.

[00:17:00]Half of this house is gone.

[00:17:02]But, the half that's gone, it was an addition.

[00:17:22]>> So this is outside boards over here on this side of the house.

[00:17:33]And then they built this other part and the additions are always the first to go.

[00:17:41]So just like what we saw with that kitchen addition in the back, this is an outside wall.

[00:17:52]Okay.

[00:17:53]So you remember what we were talking about earlier with this being reused material?

[00:17:58]This is beaded board right here. I think this is the old style of beaded board, too.

[00:18:05]A single bead tongue and groove board. So this is the single bead board is older than the thinner double bead board that we see in more of the later 1800s houses. Another piece that just shows that something else was used to at least partly construct this. It was used for one of the battens outside. It is crazy, really, to think that we're actually still standing in what once someone called home.

[00:18:50]The section was probably early though.

[00:18:52]It's still sitting on field stones.

[00:18:54]Look at how they notched out the wood for the porch.

[00:19:02]That's a big old nest of something I probably don't want to know what is in there.

[00:19:13]You know what though?

[00:19:15]I think that was a sleeping loft up there.

[00:19:18]They probably added the ceiling and turned that upstairs into a a sleeping loft.

[00:19:26]Wonder how long this rain's going to last.

[00:19:32]If I can get over this.

[00:19:59]Crazy.

[00:20:00]If this house is electrified.

[00:20:02]I didn't see any signs of electricity in here though.

[00:22:26]>> So, I just found something that I'm never would have found if I wasn't in here sheltering from the storm, and I'm not entirely sure what it is.

[00:22:52]But, I think it may be a build date I don't know. Yeah.

[00:23:00]I think it may be a build date for this.

[00:23:04]11 17 18 And then I think that's 19 18 maybe. So, this is really hard to see because there's so much going on here.

[00:23:19]That almost looks like 10 right there.

[00:23:22]But, I don't think that that is because if we look at it this way, I think It almost looks like it says on right there. O and a backwards N.

[00:23:44]Then, if we move over, it looks like 17 11 18.

[00:23:51]But, I don't think that that's 17 and the first number, I think that that's an imperfection in the mortar because it's not really connected it well, maybe. I don't know. It looks like it's connected that way, but it doesn't look like it's connected that way. I don't know. I can't really tell.

[00:24:07]It looks like on 17 11 No.

[00:24:14]17 I think that's 19 18. But, it looks like it's See, it kind of loops around and goes over. Loops around and over line 19.

[00:24:26]See, that almost looks like 17 right there, but I I telling you that looks like rock there and there. I think that's 11.

[00:24:36]19 18 And that for the life of me looks like O and backwards N.

[00:24:48]Well, I never would have noticed that if we weren't sheltering from the rain in here.

[00:25:22]>> Okay, I think I figured it out.

[00:25:41]That's 11 17 18. That's a name right there.

[00:25:46]That's a bird just be Y G I S maybe.

[00:25:56]Yeah, that's that's definitely a name not numbers.

[00:26:32]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] >> My flashlight went dead.

[00:27:47]No more charge.

[00:27:52]It does sound like the rain is slowing down though.

[00:27:54]Okay.

[00:27:56]I guess I'm going to try to make it out.