The Center for a Better South
During the autumn, brightly-colored tarps covering huge cotton bales are an important part of the scenery across the rural South. These bales, photographed by Linda W. Brown of Kingstree, S.C., are in eastern Clarendon County, S.C.
Clarendon County has 34,357 people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2012 population estimate. About half of the county’s residence are white; the other half are black.
Photo taken in 2014 by Linda W. Brown. Copyrighted; all rights reserved.
Kingstree, S.C., photographer Linda W. Brown spied these old signs along a fence of what she thought seemed to be an abandoned baseball field in rural Clarendon County, S.C.
Clarendon County has 34,357 people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2012 population estimate. About half of the county’s residence are white; the other half are black.
Photo taken in 2014 by Linda W. Brown. Copyrighted; all rights reserved.
Note the blue tarp on the roof of this dilapidated house on Sumter Street in Fairfax, S.C. The area has a lot of housing that needs improvement, according to those who live in the area and nonprofit officials.
Fairfax, in rural Allendale County, lost about a third of its population by 2010, which it had 2,025 people compared to 3,206 people in 2000, according to Census figures in Wikipedia. Per capita income was $8,940. About 38 percent of the people in the town, which had about two times as many adult males as females, lived in poverty.
Rural Allendale County in South Carolina’s southwest corner as one of the Crescent’s highest poverty rates — more than 40 percent of people live below the federal poverty level. The median household income is about $23,000 a year — half of South Carolina’s average and well below the nation’s $50,000 average.
Copyrighted photo by Andy Brack, Oct. 1, 2014. All rights reserved.
This abandoned motel on U.S. Highway 301 in rural Allendale, S.C., is almost across the road from another empty hotel we profiled in 2013.
Rural Allendale County in South Carolina’s southwest corner as one of the Crescent’s highest poverty rates — more than 40 percent of people live below the federal poverty level. The median household income is about $23,000 a year — half of South Carolina’s average and well below the nation’s $50,000 average.
Former Atlanta Journal editor Jim Wooten bought and restored the “Talmadge Mansion” of the late Gov. Gene Talmadge in rural Telfair County, Ga., a few years back, as Elliott Brack write recently in GwinnettForum.com:
“In today’s world, this residence looks much like a Southern 5-4-and-a-door, with two-story white columns, red brick, and set about 100 yards back from the highway in a grove of pine trees. But it wasn’t built in today’s world, but constructed 77 years ago when most people in Telfair County probably didn’t have running water in their homes, and many had to bring out the buckets when it rained because of leaks in the roof.”
2014 copyrighted photo by Elliott Brack. All rights reserved.
This old, rusting vernacular house east of Sycamore, S.C., is in the middle of the six-county impoverished area that the Center for a Better South has worked with area and state leaders to apply for a federal Promise Zone designation. Read about our work here.
While the farmhouse seems to be unoccupied, but may be used as a hunting cabin, it’s easy to see good workmanship in the framing. Structures like this dot the countryside throughout the Southern Crescent, a reminder of tenant farming of days gone by.
Sycamore, a village to the west of about 180 people, is about 60 percent white with a 35 percent black community of residents. Unlike the whole of Allendale County with its almost 40 percent poverty rate, poverty is comparatively low at 10 percent in Sycamore.
Photo by Andy Brack, Center for a Better South, Oct. 1, 2014. All rights reserved.
Former editor Linda W. Brown found this old building with fastened green shutters near Workman Crossroads in western Williamsburg County, S.C.
UPDATE: We first ran this picture on Oct. 1, 2013, and offer it today to steer you to a brand new section of the BEST pictures of the Southern Crescent project. Click here and you can find more than 30 of the most compelling images that we’ve offered since we got started more than 18 months ago.
“I’m not sure if this was an old store that had a shed added to it or exactly what its function was,” Brown wrote. “I think it’s a pretty cool old building, whatever its purpose was earlier in its life.”
We wholeheartedly agree. Old buildings like this can be found across the rural South on farmland that has gone fallow and where tenant families moved on a generation or two ago. Or in small towns near railroad tracks that no longer carry trains.
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.
Copyrighted photo taken on Sept. 27, 2013 by Linda W. Brown All rights reserved.
Kingstree, S.C., photographer Linda W. Brown admits that this old store in Jamestown in Berkeley County isn’t technically in the Southern Crescent. But the surrounding rural community, buffered by tens of thousands of acres of national forest, certainly does fit the image of the Crescent region with its vintage gas pumps that harken back to a time of country groceries as focal points of communities.
Copyrighted 2014 photo by Linda W. Brown. All rights reserved.
VanishingSouthGeorgia.com photographer Brian Brown believes this three-story building in Millen, Ga., once served as a hotel or a bank. Another view.
Millen, which had a population of 3,492 in 2000, is the county seat of Jenkins County, which was home to 9,213 people, according to the U.S. Census in 2012, an increase of 10 percent from two years earlier. Almost 30 percent of residents live in poverty.
Photo by Brian Brown, 2013. All rights reserved.
VanishingSouthGeorgia.com photographer Brian Brown showcased this “eclectic vernacular farmhouse” from Ohoopee, Ga., in rural Toombs County back in 2011.
Vidalia onions make the county more prosperous than neighboring counties. Still, about 25 percent of county residents live below the poverty level. The median household income is $32,464 — more than $17,000 below the national average.
Photo taken 2011, by Brian Brown. All rights reserved.