Tenant house in cotton field, Williamsburg County, S.C.
Roll-roofing-sided tenant houses, like this one, used to be a common sight in Williamsburg County. But they’re rare these days, says retired editor and photographer Linda W. Brown of Kingstree, S.C.
“I liked the cotton field in the foreground with the tenant house behind it as a reminder that we aren’t all that far removed from the days of the sharecropper. You can’t really see it, but way in the background is an old tobacco barn.”
Just under 34,000 people live in Williamsburg 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.
Photo taken Sept. 27, 2013, by Linda W. Brown. All rights reserved.