This yellow cross with plastic flowers attached is an all-too-familiar scene across the rural South. It marks the spot where someone died, likely in a terrible car crash.
This cross is located along S.C. Highway 217 next to a bridge over a swamp of the Little Salkahatchie River just inside Bamberg County near the Colleton County line.
Across the South, highway death rates are comparatively high, but have gone down in recent years thanks to improvements in safety features on vehicles.
Bamberg County is home to about 16,000 people, 27 percent of whom live below the federal poverty level, according to 2012 Census estimates. The majority of residents are black (61.4 percent) with whites comprising 36.8 percent.
The front half of this old railroad depot in Ehrhardt, S.C., has been renovated into a place that reportedly has periodic auctions. The inside looks like a little cafe. The rear part of the depot, for which there are no railroad tracks these days, hasn’t been restored.
Ehrhardt, a town of about 600 people, is in rural Bamberg County where 27 percent of its 15,763 people live below the federal poverty level, according to 2012 Census estimates. The majority of residents are black (61.4 percent) with whites comprising 36.8 percent.
The bright green trim around this deteriorating cottage just inside Ehrhardt on U.S. Highway 601 is about all that’s left that doesn’t look worn.
The town of about 600 people is in rural Bamberg County where 27 percent of its 15,763 people live below the federal poverty level, according to 2012 Census estimates. The majority of residents are black (61.4 percent) with whites comprising 36.8 percent.
VanishingSouthGeorgia.com photographer Brian Brown likes the hand-painted sign on this door of this old building in Emmalane, about four miles southwest of Millen, Ga.: “L.P. Mons, Well Driller.”
“There are lots of cotton farms in this area off the Old Savannah Highway south of Millen. In fact, the oldest cotton farm in America (Juanita M. Joiner Farm) and the oldest timberland company (Southern Woodland Company) are operated by the 8th generation of the family on lands dating to 1783.This relic, located in the vicinity of the farm, probably served the now-forgotten community of Emmalane as a general store or commissary.”
Jenkins County, whose county seat is Millen, 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.
Old farmhouse and silos, Emmalane community, Jenkins County, Ga.
VanishingSouthGeorgia.com photographer Brian Brown sent along this typical Georgia country scene about four miles southwest of Millen — an old Victorian farmhouse surrounded by silos, farm implements, dirt roads and mud puddles.
Remind you a little bit of some of the descriptions of eastern Georgia from Tobacco Road (1932) author Erskine Caldwell? Nearby on Brown’s photoblog, you can find other neat stuff around the Emmalane community: Brinson’s Bar-B-Que (“a well-loved institution in Jenkins County … three slices, of Sunbeam bread, a generous helping of potato salad and Brinson’s sweet tea complete this classic Southern meal”), Skull Creek Baptist Church and an old general store.
Jenkins County, whose county seat is Millen, 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.
The bright color and mural on this car wash in Millen, Ga., caught the discerning eye of VanishingSouthGeorgia.com photographer Brian Brown.
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.
Charleston architect Steve Coe sent along this picture of an old tobacco barn falling down on S.C. Highway 403 just north of Timmonsville, S.C.
“Every time I drive past, this the building leans just a little bit more,” he writes. “It’s as if the earth is slowly taking it back. It represents a time long since passed, but also it reminds me how everything is ‘of the earth.’
“As much as I like the building, I also feel something nostalgic about the piece of farm equipment discarded in front of the barn — how it got there, the last time someone touched it. Just something interesting about this ‘decay’ that goes on day in, day out as I go about my life.”
In 2010, Timmonsville had 2,315 people. Ten years later, it had grown by five people. Per capita income for the town was $11,714 in 2000. Timmonsville’s poverty rate was 26.6 percent in 2000, much higher than its home county, Florence, which had 19.4 percent poverty in 2010. Florence, just a few miles away from Timmonsville, is the largest city in the Pee Dee with 37,498 people in 2012. Florence County had 137,948 people, according to a 2012 estimate.
VanishingSouthGeorgia.com photographer Brian Brown writes that this old Neoclassical Revival home is currently for sale in Millen in eastern Georgia. The house, said to have been built in 1892-93 and named the “Joseph and Lucinda Applewhite House,” reportedly did not have the columns when originally built in the Queen Anne style. The columns were said to have been added in the 1980s during a renovation.
One person who saw the photo of the home in Millen, which had a population of 3,492 in 2000, wrote, “There’s nothing lonelier than an abandoned house. Oh, the memories that were made there.”
Millen 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.
Carswell Grove Baptist Church, Jenkins County, Ga.
The historic Carswell Grove Baptist Church, pictured above, about 10 miles northwest of Millen, Ga., has a complicated history, writes Georgia photographer Brian Brown in this post on VanishingSouthGeorgia.com. The current church building, now on the National Register of Historic Places, was constructed in 1919 after a lynch mob burned down its predecessor during a time of racial violence that was known as “Red Summer.”
According to an excerpt of an article in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, the church had one of the largest black congregations in eastern Georgia in 1919. An April 13 of that year as hundreds gathered to celebrate its founding, an altercation broke out after two white police officers arrived. Both police officers and a black man were killed. Another man, Joe Ruffin, was severely wounded. According to the story, which writer Cameron McWhirter published as a book in 2011(Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America):
“A white mob quickly formed and went on a rampage. The mob burned the church down, then killed two of Ruffin’s sons—one of them a thirteen-year-old. Rioters threw the bodies in the flames, then spread out through the area, burning black lodges, churches, and cars. They killed several other people; no one knows how many. The wounded Joe Ruffin was saved from the lynch mob only because a white county commissioner drove him at high speed to the nearest big city, Augusta, and put him in the county jail there.”
Brown said efforts were ongoing to preserve and stabilize the current church structure.
Jenkins County, whose county seat is Millen, 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.
Two guys talking at the Hardee’s in Walterboro, S.C.
These two guys talk after a Saturday breakfast at the Hardee’s in Walterboro, S.C. Across the South, fast food restaurants are taking the place of local diners where people have met for years to discuss community business and to gossip a little.
Walterboro, which has lost about 100 people since 2010, has a population of 5,309 people. 38 percent of whom live in poverty. Walterboro is the county seat of Colleton County, a Southern Crescent county split by Interstate 95.
Colleton County, which also has a small piece of coastline, is home to 38,153 people, 21 percent of whom live at or below the federal poverty level.
