Tarpaper Farmhouse, Pansy Road,

Ben Hill County, Georgia, 2006.

c. Brian Brown

This abandoned homesite is a typical example of the style of utilitarian houses built by rural folk from the late nineteenth well into the middle twentieth century. As there was no insulation on most of these structures, the fashion was to "side" them with a gritty, sand-like paper, often called tarpaper, as they aged. The most common of these papers was natural in color, and, as with the one above, many implemented a faux-brick pattern.