Video: Moving Alexander Farm Tenant House

The Alexander Farm Tenant House was moved across a 55-acre Cornelius farm last August of 2022 under an agreement to save the home before work on a mixed-use development began.

Few signs remain that the tenant house was once someone’s home, but the historic record shows it was.

It’s one of the last surviving examples of a tenant farming house in Mecklenburg County, according to an architectural evaluation by engineering consulting firm Terracon. After the Civil War, tenant farming, or sharecropping, emerged as a system where formerly enslaved people rented houses and land for farming from white landowners and turned profits back over to the landowner.

Not all sharecroppers were Black but a review of census records showed the families that lived in this home were, said local historian Dan Morrill.

In order to carry out the development, WIN Development needed federal permits because there is water or wetlands on the property, Morrill said. WIN had to hire a consultant to review the property for any historic buildings that could be eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. The state Department of Natural and Cultural Resources deemed the tenant house was eligible.

That led to an arrangement to save the house to mitigate any impacts like demolition as a result of the development.