You used to see stores like this all over the South, but they’re slowly being taken away by time and neglect. This store has a Twin City address, which would make you think it’s in Emanuel County, but it’s not, according to VanishingSouthGeorgia.com photographer Brian Brown.
“It’s just over the Bulloch County line on U.S. 80, near Portal,” he writes here. “The community around the store is known to locals as Cedar Lawn. Residential stores like this are few and far between today. It’s always been a common practice in cities for shopkeepers to live “above the store” but was seen less frequently in rural areas.”
The store is a dozen miles northeast of Bulloch County’s seat, Statesboro, home to Georgia Southern University. Yet the eastern Georgia county along Interstate 16 is deeply in poverty with 31 percent of residents living below the federal poverty line. Bulloch County, which has a median household income of $33,902, is home to 72,694 people (2012), two thirds of whom are white.
- More on Bulloch County, Ga., via Wikipedia.
- More BetterSouth photos from the Statesboro area
- QuickFacts from the U.S. Census.
Photo is copyrighted by Brian Brown. All rights reserved.