Clementine Hunter lived in this simple frame house from 1954 to 1977 during her most prolific years as a self-taught folk artist. Born on a nearby plantation, she moved to Melrose with her family around 1900 as a teenager, picked cotton, and later worked as a housekeeper and cook. Her first painting came in 1939 on a window shade, inspired by the artists around her, and writer Francis Mignon encouraged her to continue after seeing some of her early work. Hunter painted memories of plantation life, including picking cotton, washing clothes, threshing pecans, and gatherings for weddings, baptisms, and funerals. She worked all day at the Big House and painted late at night, creating art over four decades on canvas, bottles, boards, jugs, spittoons, milk jugs, lumber scraps, and lampshades. She sold paintings for as little as 25 cents to a few dollars, charged 50 cents for tours of paintings in her cottage, and a dollar for a photograph with her. Because she never learned to read or write and kept no records, the number of works she created is unknown, though estimates range from 5,000 to 10,000. She painted until the end of her life, dying at age 101 on January 1, 1988. Though she never became wealthy, her art gained wide recognition, including national attention from Look magazine in 1953, a 1955 solo exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art as the first African American woman to receive one there, exhibitions in New York City and Los Angeles in the 1970s, an invitation from President Jimmy Carter to the White House, and inclusion in major collections by the 1980s and at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016. Her art's significance lies in its social messages and historical context, shaped by her experience of both sides of segregation at Melrose Plantation. In 1977, the cabin was moved less than a quarter-mile to avoid demolition.