On a busy road in Vining, Georgia, about half an hour outside of Atlanta, there's a parking lot.

It's attached to a hotel across from a gas station.

A pretty common sight.

But before the hotel and the parking lot, there was a house.

And this house was decidedly unconventional.

It was decorated inside and out with homemade dolls and weavings and trinkets hanging from the trees.

There were paper streamers, pieces of colored glass and improvised sculptures.

This house belonged to an artist named Nellie May Row.

And she called it her playhouse.

I'm Johanna Mayer and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible and wondrous places.

Today, we visit Nellie May Row's playhouse.

After this.

This is Nellie May Row, singing and playing the melodian in her home.

The footage is from a film called Nellie's Playhouse, made by Linda Connelly Armstrong for the Center for Southern Folklore in 1983, the year after Nellie died.

Nellie is shown in her home, surrounded by art and creations that fill every spare inch.

But she wasn't always able to live this kind of artistic life.

Nellie May was born in 1900 in Fayette, Georgia.

Her father was formally enslaved and Nellie spent her childhood helping her family work the fields, picking cotton.

Still, her artistic impulses shined through.

I had to go to field, I didn't have a chance to be what I wanted.

I wanted to be an artist, artist.

I used to draw, but then I had to flow and draw.

...