It sounds like what we would generally call "worker housing." No halls? Perhaps it is the common "shotgun house" plan (meaning you could pretty much clean out the place from front to rear with a single blast of a 12 gauge). Can you provide us a picture so we can check? Otherwise, do a Google image search on "shotgun house" and tell us if that is indeed what you have.

Is this is a steel mill community? Textile mill? Some other sort of mill?

The mill houses in our area have water wheels beside them.

I live in a city with a lot of ca. 1900-1930 worker housing built when the mining, steel and iron industries were booming. Here's one that is currently listed, although it is very rough, and it's hard to see the house for the overgrown shrubs.

http://www.realtysouth.com/Listing/ListingDetail.aspx?Search=169d3615-995f-4dff-9922-8c200699635c&Listing=5194771&Image=1&First=41&Last=50&pagesize=10&SearchType=geographic&ListingDistrictTypeID=&FirstLetter=&Sort=1&Cookies=

The typical mill housing here is a square house with a hip roof (usually tin). I think originally these were basically 4-room houses with no indoor plumbing. So to "take one back" to its roots would not be prudent, absent a desire to traipse to the outhouse in the dead of winter. I think some updating is in order.

It is a textile mill village in Alabama,I don't have any pictures of it .I'm not thinking it is a shotgun house , aren't those a long hall with a door at each end and rooms on both sides? This house has random rooms with no hall at all. 4bedrooms 2 bath, living room and a sunroom that makes no sense at all why it is there.
I didn't measure the kitchen and the only way I can describe it is a square horse shoe, if you stand at the sink window and turned around you would take 3 steps and that would be the lengh of this kitchen, if you stood at the sink took a 1/2 step left or right that would be the width of the kitchen....even the water heater is in this space.
This square horse shoe sticks out of the square of the house, so if you tore down either wall it would be outside of the house. I hope this makes sense.
I can see past filth and clutter but for the life of me I can't do anything with this in my mind.
I would bet this house on it that the people who did this must have been drinking bong water, and that would be one bet I wouldn't mind losing! haha .
This will be our new home and I will have to do the best I can, any ideas would be cherished.
Thank you

Such houses were generally built without lavish expenditure as the mill owners weren't exactly the type to provide Circassian walnut wainscot and terrazzo floors for their low-paid workers. Still, such places are rich in interest for their historical associations.

The link below shows some pretty dramatic before-and-after rehabilitation results for worker housing at a North Carolina mill village undertaken by a revolving fund from Preservation North Carolina. Maybe these photos will inspire you.

Here is a link that might be useful: Edonton NC Mill Village

At first I also thought you meant a mill with a waterwheel.

I used to own an 1867 Victorian that was built as part of a block of "worker housing" for a wagon wheel factory. A pretty impressive perq, because the houses were stylish though small. According to the National Register, they were "single-pen I houses with internal gable-end chimneys and Italianate detailing". Big graceful windows and high ceilings, good-sized lots of 40 feet x 140 feet. Every house was identical (at least originally), but a few had two front doors because they were duplexes. All of the neighbors really enjoyed seeing what was inside the other houses on the block, different historic elements survived in each house.

There's another a group of worker houses in a nearby town, for the paper mill there. Very tiny little things, they almost look like one very big long house was sliced up and evenly spaced along the road. The owners seem to appreciate what they have, they're all nicely kept up. The neighborhood is a local landmark, very distinctive.

I grew up in a mill house. It was square divided into 4 rooms. At some point half of a long backporch was made into a bathroom so you had to go out onto the porch and then into the bath. Many good times there!

I've seen similar houses here where I am. Lots of mills here throughout the area. Actually, where my office is, there are quite a few, but they are large and many are duplexes for two families. They're just simple houses with a very plain finish and usually very sturdy. Some I think had central heat and running water added long after construction so sometimes there are some funky things going on, like where the baths end up, etc. They weren't designed by anyone in particular so sometimes you see just rooms, without much consideration to flow. Many here have floor furnaces, ( a large furnace that heats the air then sends it through really large vents in the floors of a couple of rooms rather than separate heaters for each room) but they still heat pretty efficiently. If you can get a handle on how you'd like the flow to work, you might be able to work with a contractor to make some changes that wouldn't be too draining on your bank account but would make a difference in the house flow. New kitchen maybe and a maybe open up a room or two. Anyway, good luck. I think they can be very cute houses when done and come out being very homey and livable. I grew up in one and didn't live in a new house until I was an older, so... maybe I'm biased. LOL.

Thank you dearly for all your responses, it has made me feel alot better about the house.
I guess I'm just scared, we are selling our home that is 11 years old to move in this mill house.My husband hasn't decided if we are going to buy the home fix it and sell it, or just rent until we build a new home.
So in this situation I'm not sure what to do..redo the kitchen or just make it functional.
Either way ,if you all don't mind a newbie (lol) I would like to stop by for advice during these trying times.

Thank you so much

Keeble, we're glad to have you with us and look forward to hearing about your plans. You've got a real historical gem there, so please share the excitement with us!

You mentioned the small kitchen... a good friend of mine rented an early 1800s bank house with a tiny kitchen. In addition to being only about 8x10 feet in size, it had the main entrance to the house along one wall and thus had constant foot traffic going through.

She said it turned out to be one of the best kitchens she ever had. She pared down her pots and dishes to the essentials, and then organized the room like a restaurant kitchen (she'd worked in a few), with lots of open storage and hanging racks. She really liked having everything within easy reach of the stove, and the small size of the room made clean-up easy and quick. It was a comfortable, cozy room to be in and even had a certain style to it, like a real "cook's kitchen".

Small kitchens can be nice.

Hi Keeble-Glad to find another southerner here. I'm in upstate South Carolina and the mill houses here, for the most part, are square four-room houses with either a bathroom added on or part of a back porch enclosed for a bathroom. Most have a hip roof with a chimney in the middle. I occassionally see a gable roof. Many are rental properties because they could be bought so cheaply a while back. I haven't been in one in a long time, so I can't recall the kitchen or room arrangements. In most mill villages here there were a few larger houses for the boss men. Unfortunately, around here, many of the mill villages are very rundown. My husband and his parents lived in one in the 1950's. They added the bathroom by enclosing part of the back porch. It had a sink and a toilet. No bathtub. The house had a "for rent" sign on it a few weeks ago.

I'm not sure about southern mill houses, but I've lived in and visited others in steel mill and coal towns. Typical was four rooms and a kitchen (attached) that was often pretty big. It had to fit a coal/wood stove, which can be as big as the 48 inch pro-styles around now. Originally that and a small coal burner in the front room heated the house.

The construction quality varied a lot. Those built by companies, unless they were in some flush time and full of paternalism, were pretty bad. I remember my father, a contractor, trying to shore one up that used orange crates and bits of railroad cars in the walls.

Homemade ones, or ones with homemade additions, can also be adventures. I looked at buying a house to fix once where 6 drinking buddies must have gotten together to put up the addition -- a kitchen, with bedroom above, probably added in the 1970s. The floor bounced violently, so much that you had to wonder what was in the crawl space below for support. The new stairs were cockeyed. The rooms were so off square (and the upstairs floor tilted so much) that you had to wonder how it was still there.

I currently live in a worker's house, built either for bricklayers or brewery workers. It's very solid (everything is still square 150 years later)It also has no hallways, and the original part was 4 rooms, with so many doorways that I suppose it was designed with potential boarders in mind. A 1910s addition added a kitchen and an upstairs bath and bedroom.

There is a textile mill village near me in Glencoe North Carolina. A coworker at my office has bought one of these mill houses. They have admirable aspirations to restore this area to a desirable neighborhood, but they have a ways to go yet.

Here is a link that might be useful: Glencoe Mill Village

when i was born, my parents owned a house that used to be owned by the pullman standard company of train car fame. this neighborhood is located in hammond indiana and is now in a "historic district" my mother always said that house was built like a brick sh** house and would stand forever (and it has) although it had 3 bedrooms, the house was small for a family of 5 and we moved out when i was 4. my mother said they would of have lived there longer if the room sizes were bigger............

Momcat, I considered having my wedding reception at the Hotel Florence. I used to like to visit there. Did you know that George Pullman had a train track in the basement of his Prairie Avenue home that took him right to the Hotel?
I haven't seen the area for 20 years. What's happening there now?

years ago, i went on the pullman home tour on the south side of chicago. my mom and i had lunch at the hotel florence which was undergoing renovation at the time. some of the homes we went into were remodeled beyond recognition, you gotta wonder why someone would buy a historic townhome and neuter it. other homes kept to the historic character. the 3 bedroom units had tiny, tiny bedrooms, but there was indoor plumbing and skylights brought sunshine to the upstairs hallway. i sure it was real good living for the workers at the time. our hammond pullman neighborhood had a hotel too, the hotel lindora or something like that. it was later used as a residential hotel, then a nursing home. alas, it burned to the ground in the 1980's.

We also live in Alabama and are not too far from Columbus, Georgia where they are doing some extensive reuse of the mill villages and the mills, as well. If you are not too far from there, drive around the 38th Street are near the river where they are updating and refurbishing homes just like yours. Also, over here in Alabama we have the Pepperell Mill Village that is always in a state of rehab and reuse for businesses etc. How old is your mill house? Do you think that one of the original rooms could have been the kitchen at some point in time?

I grew up in a Mill Town in rural California. When that noon whistle blew, my Mom was sure to have "dinner" ready for many a men who worked in the saw mill and lived too far away to go home...

Our house had no hallways - it was a circle layout with the bathroom separating the two bedrooms (one being where the five of us girls were raised. I slept in a crib until I was five years old.)

I have vivid memories of poking sticks in bee hives until all six hives attacked us - and Mom squirting the garden hose on us to make the bees retreat... Being in the mountains, the bears took my baby bottles. I remember my Mom killing a rattlesnake under the kitchen table that the cat drug in...

Mill houses and saw mills were my life. Now we vacation in the Sierra Nevada mountains - Grey Eagle, CA reminds me of home.

I'm glad to see someone taking on this rich part of our history with the intent of preservation. Thanks!

Sorry I haven't been online in awhile and was shocked at the responses.Carolinawren I live in Opelika and the mill house is in valley alabama.I love the mill houses here and also in valley that has been renovated.
This home on the other hand no longer looks like a mill house with all the add ons ,the poor thing sticks out amongst the others.But the replies I have read has made me see it in another light.
The bathroom on the back porch ,lol, I have heard about those my brother did some handy work on a few of them. He also said that mill houses have random measurements and nothing is an exact size or lengh, they built the homes for mill workers , speed seemed to be the upmost concern, the supervisors of the mill would have a bigger and little bit better homes built for them. I hope this information is true I'm just passing along what I've heard.
May is the month we will be moving, but first thing is to rewire the house, the person that lived there before had extension cords taped to the floor!!!It will get better right???lol
You guys are the best thanks so much