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Oglethorpe County, Georgia. 1939 or 1944. "Great Chimney House, Lexington vicinity." 8x10 acetate negative by Frances Benjamin Johnston. View full size.
Old houses were scaffolding once, and workmen whistling.
T.E. Hulme
Hire the bulldozer as this dwelling is not worth the powder to blow it to kingdom come. Also it's haunted, which you can see for yourself if you look at the ground level boarded-up cellar window where a ghost is caught on film fleeing from the basement where somebody hanged himself in total frustration over trying to make repairs. The apparition is apparent in the small tree near that window and it appears to be a woman with breasts. Also I thought I spotted somebody mooning the public in the first floor window right above it, but I think someone stuffed a throw pillow in the pane to replace the broken glass. Excuse me, someone is ringing my doorbell. Or maybe it's the ice cream man.
must be buried in the overgrown weeds.
This house is calling out to me to fix it up and love it, as a place of this vintage should be.
The stark reality of time passing. Beautiful decay. I love the bones of those once-lovely houses.
Folks would come from miles around just to dance the Virginia Reel and then spend some time on the front porch, gossiping and sipping mint juleps while listening to the songs of the cicadas and frogs.
Whenever I see one of these derelicts on Shorpy, I wonder how long has it been since it was fresh and new with its first coat of paint and its first family enjoying themselves in it? It doesn't look like it's been inhabited in the 20th century. It was probably built before electricity or plumbing were considered necessities in a house this size, which would have been the 1880s when such amenities first started appearing. Maybe built in the early 1800s, inhabited till the 1870s, then vacant ever since?
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