By Jennifer Johnson | news@onlineathens.com | Story updated at 7:37 pm on 7/25/2009
When Albert Ward started looking for a house, he didn't go to a local real-estate agent. He went to the Watkinsville postmaster.
"I told her what we were attempting to do and I said, 'I have an idea that if any house exists of this nature, your mail carriers will have seen it,' " Ward said.
Ward wasn't looking for a place to live; he wanted a place to illustrate how many Oconee Countians would have lived 100 years ago.
Sure enough, one of the dozen rural mail carriers remembered seeing a plantation-style house along one of her routes. On the property was an old sharecropper house, and it was just what he was looking for.
Ward planned to have the house moved to Heritage Park in Farmington, where a space has been created for historically valuable structures. Two old classmates from Watkinsville High School in the 1940s, Larry Weatherford and Zachary Norville, are working with him on the project.
Ward remembers the tenant farmers' houses dotting the landscape of their youth.
"Zachary and Larry and I were in our sub-teens in the midst of the Depression - that meant that we picked cotton and all our friends came in from the country on buses to go to school," Ward said. "We're all intimately acquainted with how these people lived."
When Ward arrived at the property, he expected to see the construction crew renovating the main house, not pushing the sharecropper house over with a bulldozer. He had no idea that the owner needed to tear down the dilapidated building that day.
"I went up to the construction guys and I said, 'Halt! I need this house!' " Ward said. "They told me to call the owner, who was very excited about the prospect of being able to help."
The owner told Ward she had another sharecropper house on the property that was in better condition.
And soon, history buffs will get the chance to see it for themselves.
Smith Wilson, an expert in restoring historic buildings, will advise the group as they figure out the best way to preserve and place the building. Wilson also restored an 1840s home in Watkinsville for Larry Weatherford and will arrange for the house to be transported to Heritage Park over the next few weeks.
Ward hopes that the house will be placed in a spot that is visible from U.S. Highway 441, if parks officials agree. The sharecropper house will join the Central Schoolhouse building and an early-19th century log cabin in the park.
The citizen group that advises county officials on parks issues will discuss what other buildings should be added to the historic village at its August meeting, according to Lisa Davol, the interim director of Parks and Recreation.
Once the house is settled and weatherproofed, supports will add a porch, the interior will be renovated and stocked with the types of furnishings a family of that era would have used. This likely will be the task of the Oconee County Historical Society.
"They were fairly integral in getting the Central Schoolhouse relocated to Heritage Park," Davol said.
Ward, who has written several books about life in Watkinsville, thought the sharecropper house would be an important addition to the historical village at Heritage Park.
"I've been to villages in Europe that have been set up specifically for the purpose of exposing the public to the way that people used to live," Ward said.
In his presentation to the county commission in June, he theorized that about half of the local population lived in these kinds of houses in the 1930s.
The 1930 census recorded 140 dwellings in Farmington, where Heritage Park is located. Since only 15 were listed as owner-occupied, historians can infer that most of the others were for tenant farmers.
"This sharecropper house will illustrate the way people lived up through the end of World War II, when the G.I. Bill first became available so people could get loans and start building their own homes," Ward said.
Sharecropper houses have all but disappeared from Oconee County, Ward learned as he scoured Watkinsville looking for a house. Expecting that commissioners weren't familiar with the structures, he wanted to take a picture to show them.
"You have to be about 70 years old to remember little barefoot children outside and ladies boiling water in big cast-iron pots," said Ward. "That was an everyday sight for us, which is long since gone."
Originally published in the Athens Banner-Herald on Sunday, July 26, 2009
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