Marie Antoinette, come get your milkmaids!
As a Southern crop scientist, when I see a farm with a big house and a little house I think "Ah! That's some classic Jim Crow bullshit!" But the sturdy folk of upstate New York seem to have no such qualms. They really should. Did you know that in the Hudson Valley, feudalism was legal until 1845? Farm tenants in the Hudson Valley didn't just have to pay rent to stay on the lord's land. They had to pay to leave. Good times, right? It finally ended because there was an actual, honest-to-God peasant uprising. It's called the Anti-Rent War! You should check it out sometime! It could add some useful historical perspective to reporting on adorable little cottage farms! In fact, tenant farming and sharecropping were a coast-to-coast American institution until well after the second World War. In 1920, nearly half the "family farmers" in Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma were actually sharecroppers and tenant farmers.
