Teacher's House

Teacher's House. Shields-Ethridge Heritage Farm. This house was built around 1912 as a tenant sharecropper's place and would probably have had three or four outbuildings including a chicken house, a small barn, a well house, and a privy. The original building was a two-room cabin. The chimney at the front of the house was built of stones, bricks, and concrete blocks, which suggests the thrift usually observed in the construction of a sharecropper's dwelling. But, in 1938, when an African American teacher came to teach at the Schoolhouse, this became the Teacher's House and it was enlarged with the addition of a third room. The older part has clapboard siding, while the addition has shiplap siding like Mr. Ira's gin office. It was whitewashed like many of the other farm buildings. , When it was a sharecropper's house, the front room was both a living room and a bedroom, while the back room was the kitchen, though it too had a bed in it. The addition became the teacher's bedroom. Nails for hanging a quilt can still be found in the ceiling of the front room. Nails in the walls covered by empty thread-spools were used for hanging clothes. , Beside the house there was originally a swept yard with a vegetable patch. Of the sharecropper's outbuildings only the well house remains and this has been rebuilt. , The log corncrib beside the Teacher's House was moved into the farmstead from another location to save it from destruction. It is not historically associated with the surrounding buildings.