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The plantations of Dougherty County in slavery days were
not as imposing and aristocratic as those of Virginia. The Big
House was smaller and usually one-storied, and sat very near
the slave cabins. Sometimes these cabins stretched off on
either side like wings; sometimes only on one side, forming a
double row, or edging the road that turned into the plantation
from the main thoroughfare. The form and disposition of the
laborers' cabins throughout the Black Belt is to-day the same
as in slavery days. Some live in the self-same cabins, others
in cabins rebuilt on the sites of the old. All are sprinkled in
little groups over the face of the land, centering about some
dilapidated Big House where the head-tenant or agent lives.
The general character and arrangement of these dwellings
remains on the whole unaltered. There were in the county,
outside the corporate town of Albany, about fifteen hundred
Negro families in 1898. Out of all these, only a single family
occupied a house with seven rooms; only fourteen have five
rooms or more. The mass live in one- and two-room homes.
The size and arrangements of a people's homes are no
unfair index of their condition. If, then, we inquire more
carefully into these Negro homes, we find much that is
unsatisfactory. All over the face of the land is the one-room
cabin,--now standing in the shadow of the Big House, now
staring at the dusty road, now rising dark and sombre amid
the green of the cotton-fields. It is nearly always old and bare,
built of rough boards, and neither plastered nor ceiled. Light
and ventilation are supplied by the single door and by the
square hole in the wall with its wooden shutter. There is no
glass, porch, or ornamentation without. Within is a fireplace,
black and smoky, and usually unsteady with age. A bed or
two, a table, a wooden chest, and a few chairs compose the
furniture; while a stray show-bill or a newspaper makes up
the decorations for the walls. Now and then one may find
such a cabin kept scrupulously neat, with merry steaming
fireplaces and hospitable door; but the majority are dirty and
dilapidated, smelling of eating and sleeping, poorly ventilated,
and anything but homes.
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