Featured – Page 31 – Building a better South

September 9, 2013

Empty grocery, Greeleyville, S.C.

Retired editor and photographer Linda W. Brown remembers when Greeleyville, S.C., had a busy IGA grocery store. When it closed, a Super G Foods opened in the same location. Now, that store closed and the parking lot appears to be just a place where big rigs get parked at night and on the weekend.

And so Greeleyville has become a food desert — a place lacking in consumer choices for food, much like the store we profiled earlier this year in Allendale, S.C. Without a full-service store, Greeleyville residents have less healthy and fewer close options (think convenience store) and have to drive at least 12 miles to Kingstree to shop at a full-service grocery store.

Greeleyville, population 438, is in southwestern Williamsburg County. 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.

September 7, 2013September 5, 2013

Another view, old Southampton County farmhouse

Closer view of old Virginia farmhouse. By Andy Brack.

Here’s another look at the grand, old, decaying farmhouse in Southampton County that we reflected upon in our last post. Read more here.

The complex is in Southampton County, which is known in history as the place where slave Nat Turner led a rebellion in 1831. More information is here. Today, 18,409 people live in Southampton County; three in five are white; most of the rest are black. Poverty is about 16 percent.

September 5, 2013November 16, 2014

Grand farmhouse, Southampton County, Va.

Worn farmhouse, Southampton County, Va. Photo by Andy Brack.

This stately, decaying grand Virginia farmhouse is mesmerizing and sad at the same time. While you can see a well, drinking trough for animals and a couple of outbuildings, there’s also an old store and barn at this location, a few miles north of Courtland at the intersection of Wakefield and Millfield roads.

Looking at the complex at the corner of a big field, it’s easy to imagine how this farm was a focus of rural life 80 or so years ago when lots of Southerners got their start in the country. Better South President Andy Brack writes, “Of all of the photos I took in July in Virginia, I come back to the pictures of this farm. In my mind’s eye, I can almost see donkeys and horses getting a drink, kids playing barefoot in the front yard, folks dropping by the country store to sit, talk and enjoy a cold drink.

“I couldn’t find out anything else about this place despite trying to reach members of a Baptist church just down the road. I look at how this house and its buildings, once a gem of this rural area, is falling apart. Like much of the area of the Southern Crescent, it’s suffering from benign neglect.”

September 3, 2013September 3, 2013

Tobacco barn, near Lake City, S.C.

You don’t have to drive too far in the rural Southern tobacco belt to find an old tobacco barn like this one in the middle of a field west of Lake City, S.C.

As photographer Linda W. Brown notes, “It’s interesting to see these old barns that once, at this time of year, would have been surrounded by ripening tobacco and now are not. ‘Forlorn’ is a good adjective to describe it.”

Tobacco once ruled farming in many parts of the Carolinas, Virginia and Kentucky because it was a high-price cash crop. But the production and sale of tobacco in the South has changed dramatically over the last 30 years in the South. Tobacco auctions, quotas and government price supports dominated prior to 2004 when reforms eliminated government intervention into the market and allowed growers to produce as much as they wanted [Learn more]. These days, auctions are rare — with only one in South Carolina according to this story — and growers enter into direct contracts with buyers.

Lake City, which recently started an annual arts festival to inject new life into its community, is in the Pee Dee’s Florence County near Interstate 95 in northeast South Carolina. One in five people in Lake City, population 6,715, is white, while some 77.5 percent of residents are black. The city’s poverty rate is more than 32 percent, according to the U.S. Census. The high poverty rate is a testament to Lake City’s rural nature since its home county, supported by the regional city of Florence, has a 19.4 percent poverty rate.

September 1, 2013August 26, 2013

Main Street, Greeleyville, S.C.

Once upon a time, Main Street in Greeleyville, S.C., was a thriving place, but shops have closed along Main Street, leaving a lot of it abandoned. Businesses that open now often locate on U.S. Highway 521, the three-lane main road through town.

“Several stores on Main Street that are beginning to deteriorate as can be seen in the missing bricks at the top of the store on the right of the photo,” former newspaper editor Linda W. Brown writes. “I think many downtowns are not only losing businesses to the big box stores but to the nearest U.S. highway.”

It’s much the same in small rural towns like Greeleyville, population 438, in southwestern Williamsburg County. 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.

August 30, 2013August 26, 2013

Old barn, near Emporia, Va.

Old barn, Southampton County, Va. Photo by Andy Brack.

This old barn about 2.5 miles east of the Emporia-Greensville County Regional Airport in southeastern Virginia is smack dab in the middle of a peanut field. The barn, located in Southampton County, is just off U.S. Highway 58.

Southampton County is known in history as the place where slave Nat Turner led a rebellion in 1831. More than 50 white residents were killed in the rebellion. After the state crushed it, Turner and 55 others were executed. More than 100 other blacks are thought to have been murdered by white mobs. The rebellion led to action across Virginia and other Southern states, according to Wikipedia: “State legislators passed new laws prohibiting education of slaves and free blacks, restricting rights of assembly and other civil rights for free blacks, and requiring white ministers to be present at black worship services.”

Today, 18,409 people live in Southampton County; three in five are white; most of the rest are black. Poverty is about 16 percent.

August 28, 2013September 7, 2013

Deserted complex, Dunn, N.C.

Deserted tourist complex, near Dunn, N.C. Photo by Andy Brack.

A tourist complex — motel, gas station and restaurant — are abandoned off an exit of Interstate 95 near Dunn, N.C., obvious victim to the recent recession.

The Southern Crescent follows the Interstate from the Tidewater part of Virginia around Emporia and across the Carolinas before it veers southwesterly near Savannah, Ga. Millions of people live in these mostly rural, agricultural parts of the American South. Distinguishing characteristics include high poverty rates, little new opportunities, struggling tax bases and high incidences of health problems. See our maps on this site to get more perspective.

Dunn, which had a population of 9,582 in 2012, is rural enough to experience a high poverty rate — 27.5 percent — but is part of the Raleigh metropolitan area, which provides more opportunity for residents than in many Southern communities. Raleigh’s influence is seen in how Hartnett County has more than 120,000 residents.

QuickFacts about Dunn and Hartnett County.
Wikipedia on Dunn.

August 26, 2013August 26, 2013

Voting booth, Kingstree, S.C.

Voting in Kingstree, S.C. Photo by Linda W. Brown.

A voter in Kingstree, S.C., votes in this photo on whether to change Williamsburg County‘s form of government from a council-supervisor type in which an elected official “runs” the county to a council-administrator form in which a professional manager is hired by the local council to run things.

Retired local editor Linda W. Brown says she thought the referendum failed by a 2-1 margin because of voters’ fears that the new form would erode voting rights, which were reduced when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key part of the federal Voting Rights Act earlier this summer.

Across the South, voters tend to participate in elections much like the rest of the nation. In the 2012 presidential election, for example, 58.2 percent of eligible voters cast ballots nationally. More than 60 percent of voters in four Southern states (Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina and Virginia) cast ballots, while three others exceeded the national average (Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi.) Only Arkansas, Kentucky, South Carolina and Tennessee were below the national average, but all were above 50 percent, according to a George Mason University study.

Learn more.

August 24, 2013August 24, 2013

Tobacco warehouse, Hemingway, S.C.

Growers Big 4 warehouse, Hemingway, S.C. Photo by Andy Brack.

You can see a trailer of flue-cured tobacco, at right, being taken into the Growers Big 4 warehouse in Hemingway, S.C., a small town in northeastern Williamsburg County near Florence and Marion counties.

The production and sale of tobacco in the South has changed dramatically over the last 30 years in the South. Tobacco auctions, quotas and government price supports dominated prior to 2004 when reforms eliminated government intervention into the market and allowed growers to produce as much as they wanted [Learn more]. These days, auctions are rare — with only one in South Carolina according to this story — and growers enter into direct contracts with buyers.

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.

August 22, 2013November 16, 2014

Melton store, Allentown, Ga.

13.0822_ga_meltonstore — Melton Store, Allentown, Ga.

From Better South President Andy Brack:

My Great Uncle Gordon Brack used to be a clerk in this store in Allentown in rural Wilkinson County, Georgia, where my father was a boy. Thanks to Brian Brown of the Vanishing South Georgia project for letting us republish the photo.

My dad, Elliott Brack, recalls the store in the 1940s:

“We used to buy soft drinks for five cents out of a cooler chilled by ice, pulling the drinks out of the cold water. If we had another nickel, we would buy peanuts and pour them into the Coke or RC or Pepsi for added pleasure.”

Dad says the store had a butcher and a meat market. “Items were on shelves and you told them you wanted something and the counterman reached up and got it. No self-self service much. They were general merchandise, which meant they sold feed and overalls too.”

Brown notes in his post about the store that Allentown is known for being at the intersection of four Georgia counties, although it mostly is in Wilkinson County.

Today, Wilkinson County has fewer people (9,577 in the 2012 Census estimate) than it did in the 1940s (11,025 people) when my dad was a boy here before moving to the “big city” of Macon with his family. About three in five people are white, with most of the rest being black. Poverty is about 20 percent.

More from QuickFacts from the U.S. Census.
More from Wikipedia.