The most popular images of antebellum life are grand plantation houses — but, as we’ve seen, a tiny fraction of North Carolinians lived in such houses. To get a sense of what daily life was like for a wider variety of people, we’ve developed a slideshow of historic North Carolina houses from the early nineteenth century.

Of course, even the smallest of the houses seen here would have been home to a farmer who owned land — the very poorest houses haven’t survived.

A slideshow of the lifestyles of antebellum North Carolina is available.