You never know where you’ll run into a menagerie, photographer Linda W. Brown of Kingstree, S.C. writes. She found these stone lions, elephants and giraffes in her hometown in November.
Kingstree is the county seat for Williamsburg County, which is about 75 miles north of Charleston, S.C. Just under 34,000 people live in the county. 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.
It’s been a long while since this clunker has seen life on the roadways. Photographer Linda W. Brown of Kingstree, S.C., spied it while driving on S.C. Highway 341 between Lake City and Johnsonville in neighboring Florence County.
Copyrighted photo by Linda W. Brown, 2014. All rights reserved.
Photographer Linda W. Brown says this old truck, parked in a Clarendon County field near Goat Island, S.C., almost transports you back to the 1940s and 1950s.
Copyrighted photo by Linda W. Brown, 2014. All rights reserved.
A cotton picker stands in the middle of a cotton field on S.C. Highway 261 in western Williamsburg County. Photo taken by Linda W. Brown of Kingstree, S.C., on Dec. 21, 2014. All rights reserved.
While country stores seem to be dying out in the rural South, Workman Grocery at Workman Crossroads on S.C. Highway 527 in Williamsburg County, S.C., still is in operation, says photographer Linda W. Brown of nearby Kingstree.
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.
These two mules live in Florence County on S.C. Highway 341 between Lake City and Johnsonville. Photographer Linda W. Brown of Kingstree recalls how mules, once a normal part of the Southern countryside, now are seen only rarely.
In 2010, Better South President Andy Brack wrote a commentary on the disappearance of mules across the region. He wrote in Charleston Currents:
Back in 1930, there were about 5.4 million mules in the United States, according to Census data. Today? 283,806 mules and donkeys, according to 2007 Census numbers, which combined both types of animals into one category. South Carolina had 188,895 mules in 1930, compared to 1,620 mules and donkeys today.
So what happened? Mechanization and World War II.
“When the army started to get tanks, mules pretty much went by the wayside” because they weren’t needed to pull artillery and do other work that could be done by machines, said Leah Patton, registrar of the American Donkey and Mule Society in Lewisville, Texas.
Farmers started plowing with tractors. Farm families started traveling by car or truck. Because mules, a cross between a horse and donkey, are sterile and can’t breed, the species’ numbers dropped dramatically.
Patton’s society has more than 70,000 donkeys and mules registered in an attempt to keep alive the interest in the animals. Most people, she noted, don’t register mules because they are only around for their lifetimes.
But mules are still revered in some corners where people use them for more recreational purposes — showing them and riding them. And you can still find them hard at work in developing countries where people live off the land and don’t have enough money for tractors.
Photo is copyrighted by Linda W. Brown; taken in December 2014. All rights reserved.
You can find storage sheds like this throughout the eastern Carolinas. Kingstree, S.C., photographer Linda W. Brown snapped this shot in November in the New Zion area of Clarendon County.
Copyrighted photo by Linda W. Brown, 2014. All rights reserved.
In late December, we met Travis Starkey, a Greenville, N.C., resident who is trying to focus attention on strategies to deal with endemic poverty of his part of eastern North Carolina — which fits right in with what the Center for a Better South seeks to do.
As the second post of the new year, we offer his June 2014 photo of an old shed near Rocky Mount, N.C., to highlight Starkey’s online effort, dubbed “Greenfield Southeast.” (Rocky Mount is a town of about 57,000 people that is part of Edgecombe and Nash counties in eastern North Carolina. About 19 percent of its residents live below the poverty line.)
Starkey explains in this post that there’s potential in the rural South in places like Rocky Mount that people often don’t see:
“It’s reasonable to assume that every community has unique assets and potential to create. Communities are collections of people, anchored around a place or other connective element. So my first assumption flows logically from another — all individuals have unique assets to share and deep potential to create. A community’s power, therefore, lies in its ability to generate opportunities as an outgrowth of the connections its residents share. As a country, though, we tend to ignore the potential of towns like Plymouth [and Rocky Mount] to generate growth, assuming that growth is somehow impossible anywhere outside of a major city. …
“There are nearly 24 million people living in towns smaller than 20,000 in the South. Casually ignoring the potential of those towns, not to mention the growing disparities between urban and rural quality of life, is a perilous habit that we must break.”
In late December, we met Travis Starkey, a Greenville, N.C., resident who is trying to focus attention on strategies to deal with endemic poverty of his part of eastern North Carolina — which fits right in with what the Center for a Better South seeks to do.
As the first post of the new year, we offer his 2013 photo of a green field near Roper, N.C., to highlight Starkey’s online effort, dubbed “Greenfield Southeast.” (Roper is a small town in rural Washington County, N.C. About 27 percent of Roper’s residents live at or below the federal poverty level; some 22 percent of Washington County’s residents are at or below poverty.
Here’s how he explained his blog in 2013, which has evolved over the last year and a half:
“Over the past year, I have spent hundreds of hours attempting to understand the depth of what the South is currently enduring educationally and economically, especially the rural South. Heartened by the increased attention being paid to education outcomes in cities like Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans while also wary of the long-term viability of proposed improvements, I’ve moved forward – researching (and researching) and talking with anyone I can. I’ve also been inspired by technological innovations that could deepen learning and increase economic engagement in rural communities. Over time, though, my understanding of what would be truly helpful and should therefore be immediately acted-upon within either the education or economic space has grown increasingly unclear.
“Given all of this and the fact that I am now firmly planted in eastern North Carolina, I have decided to externalize this inner conversation in the hopes that doing so will bring clarity of purpose and action to me and others. With this blog, my hope is to bring attention to and instigate focused conversation around the unique educational and economic challenges facing citizens in the South, especially the rural South. There are numerous ways to frame the conversation; but I hope to frame it loosely around people, places, and ideas that are currently playing a role or could play a role in the continued progress of this region. And I aspire to write and engage not as an authority, but as a learner alongside many others whose thoughts and deeds will surely push the conversation forward.”
The price of gasoline is dropping, as highlighted here in Hardeeville, S.C.
It’s hard to believe that prices for gasoline are below $2.00 in some parts of the Southern Crescent. Several stations at the Hardeeville, S.C., exit of Interstate 95 had low prices on Sunday, although in nearby Ridgeland, gas cost $0.50 more per gallon. Both are in Jasper County.
Jasper County, population 25,833, is just over the river from Savannah, Ga. Its location near the metro area likely is why poverty in Jasper County (21.4 percent) is half that of Allendale County to the north. Ridgeland has a poverty rate of more than 24 percent, while Hardeeville’s rate exceeds 32 percent.
