Hayes Line Historic District

Hayes Line is a small rural community just west of Thomson, Georgia, built around a farm started in 1915 by J. Matthew Hayes. Hayes, a white merchant, built his own house and then a row of modest dwellings for African-American sharecroppers and tenant farmers who worked his land, growing cotton, corn, peas and potatoes. The farm operated until the early 1950s. Eleven historic houses survive, mostly one-story wood-frame tenant houses built between about 1920 and 1930 in hall-parlor, side-gabled, central-hallway and shotgun forms. The oldest building, the Hayes House, began as a single-pen cottage and was later enlarged into a side-gabled bungalow with Craftsman details such as overhanging eaves and decorative gable brackets. The district was listed for its association with tenant farming and African-American history, and for its well-preserved collection of early twentieth-century rural houses. Many similar tenant complexes elsewhere in Georgia have been lost, and the houses here are still lived in.