OK, this is where I grew up although my Mom's house didn't look much like that when I was a kid. It wasn't yellow, it was white. It didn't have a garage, my Mom added that after my Dad passed away. It didn't have the enclosed porch on the front of the house either. The yard was full of big pine trees also. Over the last 55+ years, the pine trees were decimated by disease, hurricanes and lightening strikes, so they were all taken down.
The white house is my brother George's house and is located just to the right of my Mom's house as you face the house. The photo with the white house way off in the background is the road frontage of Mom's farm. It is located just to the right of George's house as you face the house. The white house back in the field is where my Mom grew up and I lived there for a short time before the yellow house was built.
The house in the field was originally the local school house. My grandfather bought it and moved it to it's current location on the farm in 1931. Both my grandfather and grandmother attended school in that building. My grandfather was born in 1888 and assuming he started school when he was about 7 years old, that would make that building at least 114 years old. It was originally located about 1.2 miles away and it was moved by horses rolling it across logs. My Mom gutted it and completely refurbished it about 5 years ago. It is now a rental house.
There is a close-up photo above of the soybean crop on the farm. Not too exciting to see. There is also a photo of me in a tobacco field. Down in NC the type of tobacco rasied is called flue-cured because it is place in a barn and dried by forced heat. This type of tobacco ripens from the bottom of the plant to the top of the plant, three or four leaves at a time. The bottom three or four leaves are simply knocked off on the ground and swept up when they ripen because no one will buy them. Since they touch the ground, they get covered with dirt and are very hard to process into usable tobacco, so they are simply discarded. The tobacco field in the picture has had one good harvest of three or four leaves per plant removed. The harvest was in the morning of the day that picture was taken, so you can still see the tracks of the mechanical harvester on the ground.
When I was a kid, the harvesting was all done by hand. The people doing the harvesting were called "croppers" and they walked through the field all day bent over at the waist breaking three or four leaves off the bottom of the plant. The leaves were stuffed under your arm until you couldn't hold any more, then you walked over to a trailer pulled behind a tractor and place the leaves in the trailer. It was a fun job! You started off at 5:30am-6:00am in the morning, freezing your butt off because the tobacco was covered by dew. By 10:00am, it was most likely in the 95-100 degree range and you were sweating profusely.
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