Salters is an unincorporated small community in southwestern Williamsburg County, South Carolina. Former editor Linda W. Brown writes that the residents, who like to call themselves “Saltines,” love their community and many fight hard to keep out landfills or growth of a current one.
“Visiting Salters for me is like stepping back in time to an era when people spent the afternoons sitting on their front porches watching the trains go by,” she writes.
Years back, you could easily watch trains go by from the front of this store pictured above. It’s the old C.E. Moseley Store and remains in the Moseley family. “I’m not sure when it was built, but it was open until 1943 when the Moseleys moved across the railroad tracks to a larger building,” which operated until the late 1980s.
Williamsburg County, located in the middle of the Southern Crescent, is about 75 miles north of Charleston, S.C. Just under 34,000 people live in the county, which is about the number who lived there in 1900, according to Census figures. Population peaked in 1950 at 43,807, but has dropped slowly since then.
About two-thirds of county residents are black, with almost all of those remaining being white. Only 2 percent of those in the county are of Hispanic descent. Some 32.8 percent of residents live in poverty, according to the Census. Of the county’s 1,921 firms, 36.5 percent are black-owned — a percentage that is three times South Carolina’s average.
Copyrighted photo by Linda W. Brown, courtesy of the photographer. All rights reserved.