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U Postbellum Period - Much of Orange County ' s lands remained rural in character after the Civil War. Many Piedmont agriculturists became involved in the developing system of farm tenancy. This was due in part to post-war labor shortages and cash shortages . Numerous farm families found themselves involved in the emerging system of either cash or share renting farmland . Governmental incentives, single- cropping cash crops like tobacco and a labor shortage led to development of the furnishing system of agriculture . Basically a farm family worked land for a share of the profits after the sale of the crop, or for a cash rent . Many families became beholden to local stores, as they would purchase seed , staples, and fertilizer with credit from the next season' s crop sales . Local furnishing merchants often ended up carrying the small farmer ' s debt from one year to the next . As a result, many rural people lost their homes and their possessions. Another result of these practices was the continued decimation of farmlands. Tenants would over-farm their lands to plant as much of the cash crop as they could. Mono -cropping, however, decreased soil fertility and increased erosion, and thus decreased crop yield . Farmers would purchase fertilizer on credit and thus the cycle of dependency would continue ( Stine 19890 see also discussion in Mattson 1996 : 3540) . During the postbellum years the landscape in the St . Mary ' s Corridor can be partially extrapolated from the Tate Map of 1891 (Figure 4) . The mapmaker appears to have emphasized the locations of the numerous small churches, schools, and mills, as well as other natural features such as streams and mountains . Tate only depicts three mills in the vicinity of the project area. All are on the Eno River and they are Berry ' s j Mill, Cole ' s Mill , and Cox ' s Mill (Figure 4) . ( See research results section below for discussion of mills . ) One school is listed in the area, that of Sugar Hill . This building, however, is found north of the St. Marys Corridor, and west of New Sharon Church Road, and thus outside the project area (Vanatta, Brinkley and Davidson 1921 : 1918 Soil Map) . New Sharon Church and Saint Mary ' s Chapel are found on the Tate Map . St . Mary ' s Chapel is listed as Episcopalian. One shop (Jackson' s Shop) is shown about mid- way east on St . Mary ' s Road (here called Oxford Highway) . This location would put the shop east of modern New Sharon Church Road, directly across from S . R. 1595 . The function of this shop has yet to be ascertained. The fact that only a few homeowners are listed along St . Mary ' s Road (Turner, Hill , Douglass, Wilson) is interesting . It is clear j that many more people were living in farms along the project corridor during this time period (e . g . , Jaeger et*. al. 19969 Mattson 1996) . Tate may only have shown the farmhouses of people he actually knew, or only mapped those who paid him to do so , or perhaps only mapped farm owners ' homes, as opposed to those of farm tenants . The St. Mary ' s corridor would have been dotted by numerous small farmsteads . These farmsteads could have had frame, log, or occasionally brick structures usually underpinned by fieldstone piers and/or walls, brick piers , or even wooden block supports (Henry 1999 ; Mattson 1996) . The typical house style found during the postbellum years is the vernacular farmhouse form . variants of one story "hall and parlor" and two story "I house" types (Mattson 199629 - 31 ) . Numerous outbuildings would still have been needed to house grain, hold stock, and store farming equipment . 18