FEATURE ARTICLE
Features Archive

How Farm Tenants Lived in Chatham County

After the Civil War, tenant farming and sharecropping became a way of life for the vast majority of Southern farmers.
Chatham County was no exception. Most freed slaves were without resources or access to credit to purchase land, and
many became sharecroppers. Many small landowning white farmers also lost their land in the South’s devastated
economy in the years following the Civil War. Many landless farmers—renters and sharecroppers—could not hope to
escape from landlessness, debt, and poverty.

As the number of farm tenants increased in the first three decades of the 20th century, southern farm tenancy came to be
viewed by many as a problem—not only for the tenants who were mired in poverty but also for the larger society. Southern
farm tenancy was characterized by a single cash crop agricultural system which resulted in ever poorer land and
insufficient production of food for the farmer. More than in other regions, southern farmers faced a high cost of credit for financing farm operations. And the tenant system provided relatively little opportunity for rising up the economic scale. Indeed, many small landowners were just one bad crop away from landlessness.

Concern about the problem of farm tenancy inspired a number of studies in the 1920s and 1930s as policy-makers struggled with the question of what to do about the inefficiency in farm operations and the poverty among farming families
that it produced. One of those studies, carried out in 1922 by the North Carolina Tenancy Commission, focused on the
living conditions of both farm owners and tenants in two Chatham County townships which were chosen to represent the
piedmont section of the state. The researchers interviewed almost every farmer—owner, renter, and sharecropper—in Baldwin and Williams townships and asked more than 700 questions covering a variety of topics. These included the economic situation of the families, their education, how much of their own food they produced, what their homes were like, their
health status, religious practices, and opinions about various public and community improvements. The study also looked at the degree to which tenants were able to improve their situations. Because two Chatham townships were included in the 1922 Tenancy Commission study, we have access to an unusual amount of data about that part of the county at that point
in time—a fascinating snapshot of a time and topic about which little is documented at the local level.

CCHA members Jim and Beverly Wiggins stumbled across the reports and have summarized the study in the paper “How
Farm Tenants Lived in Chatham County, NC in 1922.” The Wiggins say that they learned a lot about tenant farming in Chatham County from the study. “Clearly, farming in general, not just tenant farming, was a hard way to make a living here in 1922,” said Jim Wiggins. For example, none of the tenant homes in the townships studied had bathtubs, indoor toilets, or electric lights. In this respect, farm owners fared not much better—fewer than 2% of the homes of farm owners had bathtubs, fewer than 1% had an indoor toilet, and none had electric lights—indicating that rural living in Chatham in 1922 was still a rustic business. The Wiggins’ paper, in PDF format, also provides links to the original reports for those who wish to read further, and a brief discussion, based on other sources, of what brought the widespread practice of tenant farming to an end throughout the South.

Lange, Dorothea, photographer. House of Negro tenant family. Pittsboro, North Carolina. July 1939. Library of Congress.

Read the full study by clicking HERE