Typical house furnishings included a kerosene lamp, laundry wash pot, washboard, wood for fuel and heat, clothes line, homemade tables, glossy, multi-colored oilcloth, wooden benches with peg legs, and a few dishes of different patterns and sizes, gourds for drinking, spoons and knives.

The food safe in the kitchen had little holes punched in the tin front panels, allowing air to get inside but keeping the flies out.

Typical kitchens might have a wood range, or open hearth with heavy cast iron pot with legs, slop bucket, flour barrel, bread trays, and coffee grinder.

The tenant farmer probably had fewer possessions than all those in the above list, but many of  the basics.

Clothing might have included overalls, cotton shirts, 'union suits', pair of brogans and two pairs of socks, heavy, rough wool sweater, homemade Indian head, calico or gingham dresses with long sashes, heavy petticoats, bloomers, long black stockings, solid shoes.

Other items included a small lard or honey bucket (used as lunch box), book sack made from striped ticking, and galvanized pails.

If the tenant houses had ceilings, and if the walls were finished in either wood or plaster, the occupants were extremely lucky. In many cases tenant houses were only weather boarded and the rooms separated by a single wall.

Even if the tenant farmer had an iron bedstead, his bedding was likely a 'pallet', a sack stuffed with sweet grass, hay or corn shucks.

A corner of the room was sometimes curtained off for closet space where clothes were hung on rows of nails. Pine ladder-back chairs and rockers usually sat on either side of the hearth and maybe there was a linoleum rug. Curtains were homespun with reed pole as rod.

On the porch you would find a  water bucket and tin dipper, wash basin with 'sweet soap' and lye soap, and towels made from salt or flour sacks, hanging on a nail over which was placed a part of an old mirror.