Henry L. Warren | 100countyquest

Back in the 1890s, a New England librarian named Sam Walter Foss wrote a poem, The House By the Side of the Road, that became popular across America. Far away in rural Caswell County, North Carolina, a boy named Henry L. Warren would learn the poem as a schoolboy in the early 1900s.

Like many young men in Caswell County at that time, Henry grew up to be a tobacco farmer. When he finally retired from farming in 1968, Henry went out into his front yard one day and, using rocks and arrowheads from his property, was inspired to build a miniature house. Once he started building, he never stopped. Henry’s wife reported that as long as he had a cigarette and a Coke, he was content to be outside every day adding new structures to what was to become a village he named Shangri-La.

Henry died in 1977 but Shangri-La remains in the front yard of his former home. People driving along the road can stop and visit the village where a visitor’s journal invites passersby to leave their names and hometowns. Greeting the visitors at the entrance to Shangri-La is a sign Henry erected before his death, recalling the words of the poem he remembered from long ago, “Let me live in a house by the side of the road, and be a friend to man.”